ENDEAVOURS 

AFTER THE 

CHRISTIAN LIFE. 



FIRST SERIES. 



ENDEAVOURS 



THE LIBRARY 

OF CONGRESS 



AFTER THE 



[W ASHINGTO N 

CHRISTIAN LIFE. 



DISCOURSES 



BY 



JAMES MARTINEAU. 



* Je sais que Dieu a voulu que les verites divines entrent du cceur dans l'esprit, et non 
pas de l'esprit dans le coeur. Et de la vient qu'au lieu qu'en parlant des choses hu- 
maines, on dit qu'il faut les connaitre avant que de les aimer ; les Saints, au contraire, 
disent, en parlant des choses divines, qu'il faut les aimer pour les connaitre, et 
qu'on n'entre dans les verite que par la charite.' — Pascal. Pensees. 



NEW EDITION. 



BOSTON AND CAMBRIDGE : 
JAMES MUNROE AND COMPANY. 

M DCCC LVIII. 




CAMB RIDGE: 
THURSTON AND T0RR7, PRINTERS. 



PUBLISHERS' PREFACE. 



The following Discourses were originally published in 
two volumes, with an interval of some ten years in their 
appearance. For greater convenience they are now issued 
in a single volume. In all other respects they are repro- 
duced, with the motto, prefaces, dedication, and order of 
succession as first arranged by the author himself. 

In presenting to the American public a new edition of 
the ' Endeavor's after the Christian Life,' the publishers beg 
leave to ask to them the attention of all unsectarian admir- 
ers of religious genius, wisdom, and eloquence. They can- 
not forbear saying, even at the risk of indelicacy, that they 
believe that all competent readers will find lofty intellect, 
profound experience, commanding imagination, analytic 
power, devout tenderness, unfaltering sincerity, artistic 
skill, and consecrating purity of purpose, blended in these 
sermons in a degree hardly to be rivalled. Beyond any 
mere business regard it is a privilege to be instrumental in 
circulating or winning attention to such writings. 

Boston, November, 1857. 



PREFACE TO FIRST SERIES. 



In - a little work* published seven years ago, the Author 
of the following Discourses intimated a desire to work out 
for himself and present to his readers, a distinct answer to 
the question, 'What is Christianity?' and the work then 
put forth was designed as a mere preliminary to another, in 
which this great inquiry should he presented. The purpose 
then announced still remains, and the materials for its 
execution are for the most part prepared. The present 
volume, however, is not offered as any part of its fulfilment, 
but rather in temporary apology for its non-fulfilment. 

Of his reasons for withholding for a time that promised 
volume, this is not the proper place to speak at any length. 
A change in some of his views, and the consciousness of 
immaturity in others, have certainly had a share of influence 
in producing the postponement. But it has been occasioned 
chiefly by his desire to lay aside for awhile the polemical 
character, which necessity, not choice, has impressed upon 
his former writings ; and which, until relieved by some 
task of higher spirit, misrepresents the order of his con- 
victions, — engaging him upon the outward form of Chris- 
tian belief, while silent of the inner heart of human life and 
faith. 

Of his reasons for presenting this promised volume, the 
Author has but few words to say. As its contents were 

* The Rationale of Religious Enquiry; or the Question stated of Rea- 
son, the Bible, and the Church. 



X 



PREFACE TO FIEST SEEIES. 



written, so are they now published, because he takes them 
to be true, and good to be recognized as true by the con- 
sciousness of all men; and not having been produced as 
task-work, but out of an earnest heart, they may possibly 
find a reader here and there, to whom they speak a fitting 
and faithful word. Should the book avail for this, it will 
sufficiently justify its appearance; should it not, it will 
speedily disappear, and at least no harm be done. 

No formal connection will be found among the several 
Discourses in this volume. Prepared at different times, 
and in different moods of meditation, they are related to 
each other only by their common direction towards the 
great ends of responsible existence. The title, indeed, ex- 
presses the spirit, more than the matter, of the book ; — 
which, * endeavors ' to produce rather than describe, the 
essential temper of 'the Christian life.' 

The Author would have introduced a larger number of 
Discourses having direct reference, in word as well as in 
spirit, to the divine Ministry of Christ, did he not hope to 
follow up the present volume by another devoted especially 
to this subject, and a third on the Christianity of Paul. In 
the meanwhile, he trusts that those who, in devout reading 
of books and men, look for that rather which is Christian, 
than which talks of Christianity, will find in this little 
volume no faint impression of the religion by which he, no 
less than they, desires to live and die. 

Liverpool, June 20, 1843. 



CONTENTS TO FIRST SERIES. 



PAGE 

I. THE SPIRIT OF LIFE IN JESUS CHRIST. .... 25 

It THE BESETTING GOD ...... 38 

III. GREAT PRINCIPLES AND SMALL DUTIES ... 48 

IV. EDEN AND GETHSEMANE 59 

V. SORROW NO SIN 70 

\ VI. CHRISTIAN PEACE 80 

VII. RELIGION ON FALSE PRETENCES 92 

VIII. MAMMON WORSHIP 104 

IX. THE KINGDOM OF GOD WITHIN US. PART I. . . . 115 

X. THE KINGDOM OF GOD WITHIN US. PART II. . . 127 

> XI. THE CONTENTMENT OF SORROW 139 

XII. IMMORTALITY . . . . . . 150 

XIII. THE COMMUNION OF SAINTS . , 164 

xiv. Christ's treatment of guilt .... 176 

» XV. THE STRENGTH OF THE LONELY . . . .* . 188 

XVI. HAND AND HEART 199 

XVII. SILENCE AND MEDITATION 211 

XVIII. WINTER WORSHIP 223 

XIX. THE GREAT YEAR OF PROVIDENCE . . . .235 

XX. CHRIST AND THE LITTLE CHILD . . . 250 

XXI. THE CHRISTIANITY OF OLD AGE . . . ' . . 261 
XXII. NOTHING HUMAN EVER DIES 273 



DISCOURSES. 



i. 

THE SPIRIT OF LIFE IN JESUS CHRIST. 

Romans vii. 2. 
the law or the spirit of life in jesus christ » 

1 A man,' says the Apostle Paul, ' is the image and 
glory of God.' And truly, it is from our own 
human nature, from its deep experiences, and ear- 
nest affections, that we form our conceptions of 
Deity, and become qualified to interpret the solemn 
intimations which creation and scripture afford to us 
respecting him. Without the stirrings of divine 
qualities within us, without some consciousness of 
that which we ascribe to the all-perfect, the names 
and descriptions by which he is made known to us 
would be empty words, as idly sent to us as treatises 
of sound to the deaf, or some 1 high discourse of 
reason' to the fool. All that we believe without 
us, we feel within us ; and it is the one sufficient 
proof of the grandeur and awfulness of our nature, 
that we have faith in God ; for no merely finite 
being can possibly believe the infinite. The uni- 
verse of which each man conceives, exists primarily 
3 



26 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 



in his own mind ; there dwell the Angel he enthrones 
in the height, and the Demon he covers with the 
deep; and vainly would he talk of shunning hell, 
who never felt its fires in his bosom ; or he converse 
of heaven, whose soul was never pure and green as 
Paradise. 

In virtue of this resemblance between the human 
and the divine mind, Christ is the representative and 
revealer of both. God, by the very immensity of his 
nature, is a stationary being, — perfect, and there- 
fore unchangeable ; and so far as Jesus Christ was 
1 the same yesterday, to-day and for ever ; ' so far as 
one uniform mind and power possessed him, as one 
sacred purpose was impressed upon his life ; so far 
is he the emblem of Deity ; affording us, in speech, in 
feeling, in will, in act, an idea of God, which nothing 
borrowed from material creation or mortal life can 
at all approach. His unity of soul, the unalterable 
spirit pervading all his altering moods of thought, — 
in short, his identity with himself, is altogether divine. 
In so far, on the other hand, as he underwent vicissi- 
tudes of emotion, — in so far as he spake, thought, 
acted differently in different periods of his career, and 
a changed hue of soul came over him, and threw 
across the world before him a brighter or a sadder 
shade, — so far is he the ideal and picture of the mind 
of Man. His self-variations are altogether human. 

The casual vicissitudes of feeling in Christ, his 
alternations of anxiety and hope, of rejoicing and of 
tears, have often been appealed to, as traces of 
his having had a like nature with our own. The 
appeal is just; and shows us that he was impressed, 
as we are, by those outward incidents which may 
make the morning happy and the evening sad. But 



IN JESUS CHRIST. 



27 



besides these accidental agitations, which follow the 
complexion of our external lot, there is a far more 
important set of changes, which the affections and 
character undergo from internal causes : which occur 
in regular succession, marking and characterizing the 
different periods of mental, if not physical life ; and 
constitute the stages of moral development through 
which the noblest minds visibly pass to their perfec- 
tion. The incidental fluctuations of emotion raised 
by the good or evil tidings of the hour, are but as 
the separate waves which the passing wind may 
soothe to a ripple or press into a storm ; but the 
seasonal changes of character, of which I now speak, 
are rather the great tidal movements of the deep 
within us, depending on less capricious forces than 
the transient gale, and bearing on their surface the 
mere film of tempest or of calm. The succession 
is distinctly traceable in the mind of Christ, making 
his life a model of moral progression the most 
impressive and sublime. He thus becomes in a 
new sense the representative of ouv duty, our visible 
and outward conscience: revealing to us not only the 
end to which we must attain, but the successive steps 
by which our nature reaches it ; the process as well 
as the result; the natural history of the affections 
which belongs to the true perfection of the will. He 
is the type of the pure religious life ; all its develop- 
ments being crowded, by the rapid ripening of his 
soul, into his brief experience ; and we read in the 
gospel a divine allegory of humanity, symbolical of 
those profound and silent changes, of passion and 
speculation, of faith and love, through which a holy 
mind rises to its most godlike power. 

I propose to follow Jesus through the several 



28 



THE SPIRIT OP LIFE 



periods, so far as they appear, of his outward and 
inward history ; and to show the correspondence 
between their order and the successive stages of 
growth in a religious and holy soul. 

The only incident recorded of the childhood of Jesus 
strikingly commences the analogy between his nature 
and ours, and happily introduces him to us as the 
representative of the great ideas of duty and God 
within the soul. The annual pilgrimage from his vil- 
lage to the holy city, which had hitherto been the 
child's holiday, full only of the wonder and delight of 
travel, seized hold, on one occasion, of deeper feelings, 
which absorbed him with their new intensity. The 
visit which had become conventional with others, 
appeared at once with its full meaning to him ; and 
with the surprise of a fresh reverence, he turned from 
the gay streets, and the sunny excursion, and the 
social entertainment, to the quiet courts of the 
temple, where the ancient story of miracle was told, 
and the mystery of prophecy explained. Eager to 
prolong this new and solemn interest, he missed, you 
will remember, the opportunity of travelling back 
with the caravan of Nazareth ; and when told by his 
parents, oh their return in quest of him, ' Thy father 
and mother have sought thee sorrowing,' he replied, 
with a tone not altogether filial, ' Know ye not that 
I must be about my Father's business? ' 

The answer is wonderfully expressive of the spirit 
of young piety, taking its first dignity as an indepen- 
dent principle of action in the mind. The lessons 
of devotion are, for a long time, adopted passively, 
with listening faith ; the great ideas dwindling, as 
they fall from the teacher's lips, to the dimensions of 
the infant mind receiving them. When the mother 



IN JESUS CHRIST. 



29 



calls her children to her knees to speak to them of 
God, she is herself the greatest object in their affec- 
tions. It is by her power over them that God 
becomes Venerable ; by the purity of her eye that 
he becomes Holy ; by the silence of the hour that he 
becomes Awful ; by the tenderness of her tones that 
he becomes Dear. That the parents bend, with 
lowly look and serene result, before some invisible 
Presence, is the first and sufficient hint to the heart's 
latent faith ; which therefore blends awhile with the 
domestic sympathies, simply mingling with them an 
element of mystery, and imparting to them a deeper 
and less earthy coloring. But the thoughts which 
constitute religion are too vast and solemn to remain 
subordinate. They are germs of a growth, which, 
with true nurture, must burst into independent life, 
and overshadow the whole soul. "When the mind, 
beginning to be busy for itself, ponders the ideas of the 
infinite and eternal, it detects, as if by sudden inspira- 
tion, the immensity of the relations which it sustains to 
God and immortality : the old formulas of religious 
instruction break their husk, and give forth the seeds 
of wonder and of love ; everything that seemed before 
great and worthy is dwarfed ; and human affinities 
and duties sink into nothingness compared with the 
heavenly world which has been discovered. There 
is a period, when earnest spirits become thus posses- 
sed ; disposed to contrast the grandeur of their new 
ideal with the littleness of all that is actual ; and to 
look with a sublimated feeling, which in harsher 
natures passes into contempt, on pursuits and rela- 
tions once sufficient for the heart's reverence. At 
such a crisis it was that Jesus gave the answer to 
bis parents ; when his piety first broke into original 

3* 



30 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 



and self-luminous power, and not only took the 
centre of his system, but threatened to put out those 
lesser and dependent lights which, when their place 
is truly understood, appear no less heavenly. He 
spake in the entranced and exclusive spirit of young 
devotion. "Well then may we bear with the rebukes 
which this earnest temper is sometimes impelled to 
administer : for by a mental neccesity, all strong feel- 
ing must be exclusive, till wisdom and experience 
have trained it; till the worth of many things has 
been ascertained ; till God is seen, not sitting aloof 
from his creation to show how contemptible it is, but 
pervading it to give it sanctity ; till it is found how 
much that is human is also divine. None learned 
this so soon or so profoundly as Jesus. And even 
now, the very sight of home restored his household 
sympathies again ; for when he went to Nazareth 
with his parents, 1 he was obedient unto them ; and 
increased in favor' with ' man ' as well as ' God.' 

Nearly twenty years elapsed. Boyhood passed 
without events. The slight flush of the youthful 
soul had fled. Vainly did Mary notice how a light, 
as from within, came upon his features, as he bent 
over his daily toil, or forced him to pause, as if in 
some secret and ineffable colloquy. Though the life 
of God within him was strong enough to win the 
world, and give direction to its reverence for ever, he 
was a villager still, serving the same necessities, and 
pacing the same track of custom as others. It was 
inevitable that the spiritual force within him should 
make insurrection against the narrow and cramping 
conditions by which it was confined; that it should 
strive to burst its fetters, and find or create a career 
worthy of itself : in short, that we should find Jesus 



IN JESUS CHRIST. 



31 



no longer at Nazareth, but in the wilderness ; led 
thither in spite of himself, of interest and comfort, 
of habit and home, by the beckoning of the divine 
image in his heart. That solitude he was impelled 
to seek, that he might grapple face to face with the 
evil and earthly spirits that beset our path, disengage 
himself from the encumbrances of usage and of 
doubt, and struggle into a life befitting one who 
stands in immensity and dwells with God. To the 
eye of the outward observer he may appear alto- 
gether quiet, sitting on the bleak rock in the collapse 
of feebleness and rest. Nevertheless, in that still 
form, is the most terrible of conflicts ; an exchange 
of awful defiances between Heaven and Hell; a 
heaving and wrestling of immortal powers, doing 
battle for the mind of Jesus, and suspending on that 
moment the souls of millions and the destinies of 
the world. His holy spirit won the victory; the 
angels of peace and power led him forth ; and the 
transition was made from the obscurity of ordinary 
toil to the glory of his everlasting ministry. 

Now in the development of all earnest and noble 
minds there is a passage corresponding with this 
scene. There is a time when their image of Duty 
grows too large for the accidental lot in which it is 
encased, and seeks to burst it; when human life 
changes its aspect before the eye ; and custom can 
no longer show it to us as a flat dull field, where we 
may plough, and build, and find shelter and sleep ; 
but it swells into verdant slopes, that lie around the 
base of everlasting hills, whose summit no man can 
discern, passing away as a dim shape into the blue 
infinite where not a cloud can linger. There is a 
crisis when every faithful son of God is agitated by 



32 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 



a fierce controversy between the earthly and the di- 
vine elements of his nature. Self and the flesh 
seductively whisper, ' Thou hast a life of many 
necessities ; earn thy bread and eat it ; and pay thy- 
self for all thy trouble with a warm hearth and a 
soft bed.' The voice of God thunders in reply, 
' Thy life is short, thy work is great, thy God is near, 
thy heaven is far ; do I not send thee forth, armed 
with thought, and speech, and a strong right hand, 
to contend with the evil and avenge the good? 
Indulge no more, or I shall leave thee ; do thy best, 
and faint not ; take up thy freewill, and come with 
me.' By some such conflict does every great mind 
quit its ease to serve its responsibilities ; part, if need 
be, with the sympathy of friends and the security of 
neighborhood, in fidelity to duty ; and suffer wasting 
and loneliness, as in the bleakest desert, till tempta- 
tion be vanquished, and hesitancy flung aside. 

The course of Jesus was now taken. The peasant 
had assumed the prophet's mantle and Messiah's 
power. How calm and free his mind had thus be- 
come, how unembarrassed it dwelt in the pure 
atmosphere of its own convictions, is evident from 
this ; that to his own village he went, and announced 
the change. In the very synagogue where parents 
and neighbors worshipped, and aged knees to which 
he had clung in infant sport were bent in prayer ; 
where his ear had first heard the music, and his soul 
felt the sublimity of ancient prophecy, there, ' He 
opened the book, and found the place where it was 
written, " The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, be- 
cause he hath anointed me to preach glad tidings to 
the poor ; he hath sent me to proclaim liberty to the 
captives, and recovery of sight to the blind ; to let 



IN JESUS CHRIST. 



33 



the oppressed go free, to proclaim the acceptable 
year of the Lord." ' No wonder that as he spake in 
comment worthy of such a text, his hearers 'were 
astonished at the gracious words that proceeded from 
his lips.' The moment introduced, and fitly repre- 
sents, the first era of his ministry ; during the whole 
of which a joyous inspiration was on him. No sad 
forebodings visited him ; no doubts restrained his 
freedom ; no tears gushed forth to check his voice of 
mercy and delay his word of power. It was a hope- 
ful and vigorous career ; crowded with blessed deeds, 
and flushed with countless benedictions, that only 
kindled him to an alacrity more godlike. Nay, it 
seemed impossible for him to bear his own messages 
of love fast enough ; and first the Twelve, and then 
the Seventy, were sent successively forth on a syste- 
matic mission, to multiply his power, and make ready 
the paths of peace. The report of the Seventy, on 
their return, declares the triumph of his name and 
spirit, not only in the conquest of disease, but in the 
attachment of the poor and the oppressed ; and with 
the glow of the glad devotion that marks this period, 
Jesus exclaimed, ' I beheld Satan, as lightning fall 
from heaven.' The Twelve brought far different 
tidings, which changed again the colors of his life. 

Who does not discern, in the history of every faith- 
ful mind, a period like this ? — a period immediately 
following the solemn league and covenant which we 
make with Duty. Through sore and dark tempta- 
tions the Christian first emerges into the freewill, by 
which he stands up and lives in the likeness of God ; 
and then, in the joy of his freedom and sincerity, 
he springs, with self-precipitation, into the mission 
heaven assigns. That which he speaks, is it not 



34 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 



true? that which he feels, is holy; that which he 
desires, is great and good. He loves the souls he 
would convert, and knows them of the same family 
with his own. He has conquered in himself the 
weakness and the ills with which he wars in others ; 
and shall he not have faith ? God is vaster than the 
most gigantic wrongs ; and Ids righteousness, which 
is as the great mountains, will speedily suppress them 
in the abyss. In the power of this glorious faith, the 
true servant and prophet of the Lord goes forth; 
makes a generous and confident rush upon evil ; and, 
since it is the Immortal against the Perishable, he 
trusts to sweep it off and triumph in its flight. But 
alas! the time is short, the conflict long; and faint 
and bleeding, he discovers that he must fall, before 
the cry of victory. And yet was that faith of his 
most true. Its computation of forces was most un- 
erring; for always shall evil be overcome by good; 
with mistake, you will say, in its dates ; but that is 
only the prophet's mistake, that sees the future as 
the present, and considers the certainties of God 
superior to time. Thus right-souled man has up- 
lifted his arm, and done a faithful work ; and the 
efforts of the wise and holy are not mere momentary 
strokes, dissipated and lost ; but an everlasting pres- 
sure upon ill, with tension increasing without end, 
till it drives the monstrous mass across the brink of 
annihilation. 

Sad, however, is the hour when generous hope re- 
ceives its first check ; and with mournful attention 
Jesus hears, on the return of the Twelve, tidings of 
hostility and danger, forcing on him the conviction, 
that he must die : tidings especially of the vigilance 
of Herod, recent murderer of John the Baptist. The 



IN JESUS CHRIST. 



35 



shock was somewhat sudden. He retreated into 
solitude among the hills, that he might feel awhile, 
without obstruction, the refuge of his disciples' 
friendship and his Father's power. And soon in the 
Transfiguration, where his mind conversed with 
prophets of an elder age, the impression of his de- 
cease, as the penalty of his faithfulness, becomes 
finally fixed. Thenceforth, as it seems to me, not 
only did his views and expectations undergo a great 
change, and receive a large accession of truth, but 
the spirit and moral tone of his ministry was differ- 
ent. Steadfast as before, even to 1 set his face to go 
to Jerusalem,' he is less joyous and more serene ; 
more earnest and lofty, as if his great aims had be- 
come sublimer for the distance to which they had 
receded, and dearer for the price at which they must 
be gained ; more prone to tears, when asked for by 
the griefs of others, more driven to prayer in wrest- 
ling with his own. If his deeds of power, — which 
by their nature must be self-repetitions, — are less 
frequent, he gives himself more to speech, varying 
ever those words of eternal life from which all ages 
learn divinest wisdom. And so he passes on to his 
crucifixion ; numbering the days only by the duties 
that remain ; devoting himself to the crowds of Jeru- 
salem by day, and to the family of Bethany at even ; 
in the morning teaching in the temple, and predicting 
its fall at night; blessing the widow's charity ; laying 
bare the priest's hypocrisy ; found by his conspirators 
at midnight prayer ; in the trial, concerned for Peter ; 
in the hall, convulsing the conscience of Pilate ; on 
the fatal road, turning with pity to the daughters of 
Jerusalem ; and not exclaiming, ' It is finished,' till 
from the cross he looked on a mother for whom he 



38 



THE SPIEIT OP LIFE 



found a home, and a disciple whom he made blessed 
by his trust. 

And even this last change in Christ appears to be 
not a mere external modification, but an internal 
ripening of his perfect character, the last unfolding of 
its progressive beauty ; to which also there is a cor- 
responding stage, wherever the true religious life 
fulfils its course. When the first sanguine enter- 
prises of conscience seem to fail (though fail they 
cannot, except to live as fast as our impatient fancies) ; 
when a cloud, like that which fell upon Christ's future, 
descends upon the prospects of the good ; when the 
evils, against which he has taken up his vow, with- 
stand the siege of his enthusiasm, and years ebb 
away, and strength departs, with no visible impression 
made ; and friends become treacherous, and foes 
alert, and God's good Providence seems tedious and 
cruel, — then weak spirits may succumb, able to keep 
faith alive no more; and even the man mighty of 
heart may find the controversy great, whether to go 
on and bear up against such sorrow of the soul. But 
if he be wise, he clings more firmly to his fidelity, and 
thinks more truly of his mission, wherein he is ap- 
pointed not to do much, but to do well. He too takes 
counsel of the prophets of old, — the sainted spirits 
of the good, who rebuke his impatience, and tell him 
that they followed each other at intervals of centu- 
ries, and as they found, so after true service did they 
leave, the mighty work of good undone ; that the 
fruits of heaven will not ripen in some sunny hour ; 
but every noble mind must lend its transitory ray ; 
and then, when the full year of Providence has gone 
its round, perchance the collective sunshine of hu- 
manity may have matured the produce of the tree of 



IN JESUS CHRIST. 



37 



life. Such communion does indeed speak to him of 
his 'decease which he must accomplish;' asks him 
to join the glorious succession of the good; sends 
him with transfigured spirit back into the field of 
duty ; gives him a sadder but more enduring wisdom ; 
by which, with or without hope, in or out of peril, he 
lives and labors on ; in renouncing power and suc- 
cess, winning their divinest forms ; and through self- 
crucifixion gifted with immortality. 



4 



THE BESETTING GOD. 



Psalm cxxxtx. 5. 

thou hast beset me behind axd before, axd laid thine 
hand upox me. 

Perhaps it is impossible for us to represent God to 
our minds under any greater Physical image, than 
that of his diffused presence through every region of 
space. Certainly, to feel that He lives, as the preci- 
pient and determining agent, throughout the universe, 
conscious of all things actual or possible from the 
vivid centre to the desert margin of its sphere, exclu- 
ded from neither air, nor earth, nor sea, nor souls, but 
clad with them as a vestment, and gathering up their 
laws within his being, is a sublimer, and therefore 
a truer mode of thought, than the conception of a 
remote and retired mechanician, inspecting from 
without the engine of creation to see how it per- 
forms. Indeed this mechanical metaphor, so skilfully 
elaborated by Paley, appears to be of all representa- 
tions of the divine nature the least religious ; its very 
clearness proclaiming its insufficiency for those affec- 
tions which seek, not the finite, but the infinite ; its 
coldness repelling all emotions, and reducing them to 
physiological admiration : and its scientific procedure 
presenting the Creator to us in a relation quite too 
mean, as one of the causes in creation, to whom a 



THE BESETTING GOD. 



39 



chapter might be devoted in any treatise on dyna- 
mics ; and on evidence quite below the real, as a 
highly probable God. The true natural language of 
devotion speaks out rather in the poetry of the 
Psalmist and the prayers of Christ ; declares the 
living contact of the Divine Spirit with the human, 
the mystic implication of his nature with ours, and 
ours with his ; his serenity amid our griefs, his sanc- 
tity amid our guilt, his wakefulness in our sleep, his 
life through our death, his silence amid our stormy 
force ; and refers to him as the Absolute basis of all 
relative existence ; all else being in comparison but 
phantasm and shadow, and He alone the real and 
Essential Life. 

Were we to insist on philosophical correctness of 
speech in matters transcending all our modes of defi- 
nition, we should reject, as irrational and in truth 
unmeaning, the question respecting any Spiritual 
being, ' where is he ? ' Local position, physical pres- 
ence, is a relation of material things, and cannot be 
affirmed of Mind, without confounding it with the 
body. Thought, will, love, which have no size and 
take up no space, can be in no spot, and move to 
none ; and to the souls of which these are attributes 
we can ascribe neither habitation nor locomotion. It is 
only the bodily effects, and outward manifestations 
of mental force, — the gestures of the visible frame 
and the actions of the solid limbs, — to which place 
can be assigned ; and when we say, that we are here 
and not there, it is to this organic system connected 
with our spiritual nature, and to this alone, that we 
refer. Were we to press the notion further, and en- 
deavor to settle the question, where our minds are, 
the intrinsic impropriety of the question would leave 



40 



THE BESETTING GOD. 



us altogether at a loss. There would be no more 
reason to attribute to the soul a residence within the 
body, than in the remotest station of the universe ; 
for God could as well establish a constant relation 
between the mind and the organism on which it was 
to act, at a distance thus vast, as in the nearest prox- 
imity ; and there would be no more wonder in the 
movement of my arm on earth complying with my 
will at the confines of the solar system, than in the 
constant rush of our world on its career, in obedience 
to a sun separated by distance so immense. It may 
be, after all, but figuratively that we speak of any 
migration of the soul in death. "When the body 
appropriated to it as its instrument and expression 
falls, we cannot say that the mind is here ; we 
dream of what we know not, if we fancy it to re- 
quire removal in order to present itself manifestly 
in a higher region. One order of physical relations 
being dropped here, another may on the instant be 
assumed elsewhere, revealing the spirit to a new 
society, and giving it the apparition of fresh worlds. 

If we are unable to speak, otherwise than in 
figures, of the place of our minds, it is not surprising 
that God's presence is quite ineffable, and that we 
bow with reverent assent to the poet's admission, 
i such knowledge is too wonderful for me.' But the 
confession of our ignorance once made, we may pro- 
ceed to use such poor thought and language as we 
find least unsuitable to so high a matter ; for it is 
the essence and beginning of religion to feel, that 
all our belief and speech respecting God is untrue, 
yet infinitely truer than any non-belief and silence. 
In whatever sense then, and on whatever grounds, 
we affirm the tenancy of our own frame by the soul 



THE BESETTING GOD. 



41 



that governs it, must we fill the universe with the 
everlasting Spirit of whose thought it is the develop- 
ment. His agency is all-comprehending ; and de- 
clares itself alike before us, from whichever side of 
the world's orbit, from whatever phase of life we 
survey the spectacle of the heavens, or the phenom- 
ena of human history ; nor can we help regarding the 
physical laws of creation (the same in all worlds) as 
his personal habits ; the moral order of Providence 
as the unfolding of his character; the forms and flush 
of the universal beauty as the effusion of his art ; 
the griefs and joys, the temptations, lapses and tri- 
umphs, and all the glorious strife of responsible 
natures, as the energy of his moral sentiments, and 
his profuse donation of a divine freewill. It is true we 
do not everywhere alike discern him ; but this is our 
blindness, and not his darkness. In the narrow ways 
of common life, amid the din of labor and traffic, he 
seems to pass away ; though it were well that his 
sanctity should be nigh, to cool the heats, and guard 
the purity, of our toiling and tempted hours. But 
we acknowledge space and silence to be his Attri- 
butes ; and when the evening dew has laid the 
noon-day dust of care, and the vision strained by 
microscopic anxieties takes the wide sweep of medi- 
tation, and earth sleeps as a desert beneath the 
starry Infinite, the unspeakable Presence wraps us 
close again, and startles us in the wild night-wind, 
and gazes straight into our eyes from those ancient 
lights of heaven. 

And to that same Omnipresence which the indi- 
vidual thinker thus consciously realizes, the collective 
race of men is perpetually bearing an unconscious 
testimony. As if in acknowledgment of the mys- 
4* 



42 



THE BESETTING GOD. 



tery of God, as with an instinctive feeling that his 
being is the meeting-place of light and shade, and 
that in approaching him we must stand on the con- 
fines between the seen and the unseen ; all nations 
and all faiths of cultivated men have chosen the 
twilight hour, morning and evening, for their devo- 
tion ; and so it has happened that, all round the earth, 
on the bordering circle between the darkness and 
the day, a zone of worshippers has been ever spread, 
looking forth for the Almighty tenant of space, one 
half towards the East, brilliant with dawn, the other 
into the hemisphere of night, descending on the "West. 
The veil of shadow, as it shifts, has glanced upon 
adoring souls, and at its touch, cast down a fresh 
multitude to kneel ; and as they have gazed into op- 
posite regions for their God, they have virtually owned 
his presence 1 besetting them behind and before.' Our 
planet, thus instinct with devout life, girded with 
intent and perceptive souls, covered over, as with 
a divine retina, by the purer conscience of humanity, 
is like a living eye, watching on every side the im- 
mensity of Deity in which it floats, and grateful for 
the rays that relieve its native gloom. We some- 
times complain of the conditions of our being, as 
unfavorable to the discernment and the love of God ; 
we speak of him as veiled from us by our senses, and 
of the world as the outer region of exile from which 
he is peculiarly hid. In imagining what is holy and 
divine we take flight to other worlds, and conceive 
that there the film must fall away, and all adorable 
realities burst upon the sight. Alas! what reason 
have we to think any other station in the universe 
more sanctifying than our own ? There is none, so 
far as we can tell, under the more immediate touch 



THE BESETTING GOD. 



43 



of God; none, whence sublimer deeps are open to 
adoration ; none, murmuring with the whisper of 
more thrilling affections, or ennobled as the theatre 
of more glorious duties. The dimness we deplore 
no travelling would cure ; the most perfect of obser- 
vatories will not serve the blind ; we carry our dark- 
ness with us ; and instead of wandering to fresh 
scenes, and blaming our planetary atmosphere, and 
flying over creation for a purer air, it behoves us 
in simple faith, to sit by our own wayside and cry, 
< Lord, that we may receive our sight.' The Psalm- 
ist found no fault with this world as setting God 
beyond his reach ; but having the full eye of his 
affections opened in perpetual vigil, he rather was 
haunted by the Omniscient more awfully than he 
could well bear, and would fain have found some 
shade, though it were in darkness or the grave, from 
a presence so piercing and a light so clear. Those to 
whom the earth is not consecrated, will find their 
heaven profane. 

God 'besets us behind and before' in another 
sense. He pervades the successions of time as well 
as the fields of space, and occupies eternity no less 
than immensity. The imagination faints beneath 
the weight of ages which crowd upon it in the sim- 
plest meditation on his being, and in the utterance 
of the most familiar of our prayers. We call him 
the ' God of our fathers ;' and we feel that there is 
some stability at centre, while we can tell our cares 
to One listening at our right hand, by whom theirs 
are remembered and removed; who yesterday took 
pity on their quaint perplexities, and smiles to-day 
on ours, not wiser yet, but just as bitter and as real ; 
and who accepts their strains of happy and emanci- 



44 



THE BESETTING GOD. 



pated love, while putting into our hearts the song of 
exile and the plaint of aspiration. We invoke him 
as the ' God of Jesus ; ' and so doing, we have contact 
with a Mind yet conscious of every scene in the 
tragedy of Palestine, wherein the shadows of the 
Lake-storm are uneffaced, and the cry of the cruci- 
fixion is ringing still. We speak to him as the 
' Ancient of days ; ' and so converse with One who 
feels not the gradations of intensity that make dif- 
ference to us between the present and past, with a 
consciousness that has no perspective ; and we rest 
on the surface of an unfathomable nature, comprising 
without confusion the undulation of all events, be it 
the tidal sweep of centuries, or the surges of a na- 
tion's rage, or the small and vivid ripplings of private 
grief. Nay, we pray to him as having abode l in 
heaven;' and we cannot lift our eye to that pure 
vault, without thinking how old are those stars amid 
which our imagination enspheres him; how they 
watched over patriarchs in the plain of Mamre, and 
paced the night in the same order, and with like 
speed, as yesterday ; how they were ready there to 
meet the first human sight that was turned aloft to 
gaze ; and witnessed those primeval revolutions that, 
having prepared the earth for men, left their grotesque 
and gigantic vestiges as hieroglyphic hints to carry 
him back into the waste places of eternity, and 
measure for him God's most recent step out of the 
Everlasting. How do the most vehement forms of 
history, the tempestuous minds that from any other 
point of view would terrify us by their might, — the 
savage hordes that have swept as a whirlwind over 
the patient structure of civilization, — how do they 
all, in this contemplation, dwindle into momentary 



THE BESETTING GOD. 



45 



shapes, angel or demon spectres, vividly visible and 
suddenly submerged! By the granite pillars of God's 
eternity, deep-rooted in the abyss, we all in turn climb 
to the surface for a moment, to slip again into the 
night. But during the moment we are there, if we 
use that moment well, we all see the same Presence ; 
turning this way and that, we perceive only that he 
besets us behind and before. The Psalmist came up 
at a very different point of eternity from ourselves ; 
and as he looked fore and aft, he could see only God. 
We, who are presented at a station where the He- 
brew poet himself is quite invisible, discern on every 
side the same immensity which he adored. Well 
may we fall down and worship with every creature, 
' Great and marvellous are thy works, O Lord God 
Almighty ! who art, and wast, and art to come.' 

There is yet another sense, in which we must con- 
fess that God ' besets us behind and before.' His 
physical agency in all places is a great and solemn 
certainty ; his ceaseless energy through all time pre- 
sents us with sublimer thoughts ; but there is a moral 
presence of his Spirit to our minds which places us 
in relations to him more intimate and sacred. Surely 
there occur to every uncorrupted heart some stirrings 
of a diviner life ; some consciousness, obscure and 
transient it may be, but deep and authoritative, of a 
nobler calling than we have yet obeyed ; a rooted 
dissatisfaction with self, a suspicion of some poison 
in the will, a helpless veneration for somewhat that is 
gazed at with a sigh as out of reach. It is the touch 
of God upon us ; his heavy hand laid upon our con- 
science, and felt by all who are not numb with the 
paralytic twist of sin. Even the languid mind of 
self-indulgence, drowsy with too much sense, com- 



46 



THE BESETTING GOD. 



placent with too much self, scarcely escapes the 
sacred warning. For though it is quite possible that 
such a one may have no compunctions in the retro- 
spect which he takes from the observatory not of 
conscience but of comfort, though he may even have 
lapsed from all knowledge of remorse, so that God 
has ceased to 'beset him from behind;' yet the 
future is not securely shut against contingencies ; 
and a moment of alarm, a shock of death, a night of 
misery, may burst the guilty slumber, and wake the 
poor mortal, as on a morning breaking in tempest, 
with the flash of conviction, Behold ! 'tis God ! To 
most, I believe, there comes at least the casual mis- 
giving, that there is a destiny to which no justice of 
the heart has yet been done ; and to each, there is 
the anticipated crumbling away of all his solid 
ground in death ; which even to the sternest unbelief 
is a lapsing into the dark grasp of an annihilating 
God. So that the Almighty Spirit besets even these 
most lonely of his children ''from before' And as 
for minds that are awake and in anywise in quest 
of him, he haunts them every way. O! that we 
could but know it to be quite false that the good 
man is satisfied from himself. When was there ever 
one of us who did not feel his recollections full of 
shame and grief, and find in the past the cup that 
overflowed with tears ? When one that did not look 
into the future with resolves made timid and anxious 
by the failures of experience, and distrust that breaks 
the high young courage of the heart, and prayers 
that in utterance half expect refusal ? Which of us 
can stand this day at the solemn meeting point of 
past and future, without abasement for the one, and 
trembling for the other ? — without being beset by 



THE BESETTING GOD. 



47 



the divine Spirit in penitent regrets from behind, and 
in passionate aspirations from before ? And herein we 
should discover only this ; that he has laid his hand 
upon us; has resolved to claim us to the uttermost; 
and will haunt us with his rebukes, though they 
wither us with sorrow, till we surrender without 
terms. 

It is not apparently the design of heaven that we 
should be permitted to seek rest and to desire ease 
in this aspiring state ; and it is the vain attempt to 
make compromise between duty and indulgence, that 
creates the corrosions of conscience, and the perpetual 
disquietudes of spirit, and disappoints our own ideal 
from day to day, and from year to year. There is 
no way to the peace of God but by absolute self- 
abandonment to his will that whispers within us, 
without reservation of happiness or self. Then, the 
relinquishment once made, — giving ourselves up to 
any high faith within the heart, — the sorrows of 
mortality, its reproaches, its fears, will soon vanish, 
and even death be robbed of its terrors ; for, to quote 
the noble words of Lord Bacon, He that dies in an 
earnest pursuit is like one that is wounded in hot 
blood, who for the time scarce feels the hurt; and 
therefore a mind fixed and bent upon somewhat that 
is good, doth best avert the dolors of death.' 



III. 



GREAT PRINCIPLES AND SMALL DUTIES. 
John xiii. 14. 

if i then, tour lord and master, have washed your feet, te 
ought also to wash one another's feet. 

Every fiction that has ever laid strong hold on 
human belief, is the mistaken image of some great 
truth; to which reason will direct its search, while 
half-reason is content with laughing at the super- 
stition, and unreason with believing it. Thus, the 
doctrine of the Incarnation faithfully represents the 
impression produced by the ministry and character of 
Christ. It is the dark shadow thrown across the ages 
of Christendom by his mortal life, as it inevitably 
sinks into the distance. It is but the too literal de- 
scription of the real elements of his history ; a mis- 
take of the morally, for the physically divine; a 
reference to celestial descent of that majesty of soul, 
which, even in the eclipse of grief, seemed too great 
for any meaner origin. Indeed how better could we 
speak of the life of Jesus, than in the language of 
this doctrine ; as the submission of a most heavenly 
spirit to the severest burthen of the flesh, — the volun- 
tary immersion within the shades of deep suffering 
of a godlike mind, visibly radiant with light unknown 
to others, and betraying its relation to eternity, while 
making the weary pilgrimage of time? It was the 
peculiarity of his greatness that it — stooped, I will 



GREAT PRINCIPLES AND SMALL DUTIES. 49 

not say, but — penetrated without stooping, to the 
humblest wants; not simply stepped casually aside 
to look at the most ignominious sorrows, but went 
directly to them, and lived wholly in them; scattered 
glorious miracles and sacred truths along the hidden 
by-paths and in the mean recesses of existence ; 
serving the mendicant and the widow, blessing the 
child, healing the leprosy of body and of soul, and 
kneeling to wash even the traitor's feet. In himself 
was the serene and unapproachable dignity of a 
higher nature, a mind at one with the universe and 
its Author ; in his acts, a frugal respect to the most 
neglected elements of human life, declaring that he 
came not to be ministered unto but to minister. 
What wonder that, when he had been ensphered in 
the immortal world, he appeared to the affectionate 
memories of men as a divine being who had disrobed 
himself of rightful glory to take pity on their sor- 
rows, and put on for the gladness of praise the 
garment of heaviness? The conception is at least 
in close kindred with a noble truth ; — that a soul 
occupied with great ideas best performs small duties ; 
that the divinest views of life penetrate most clearly 
into the meanest emergencies ; that so far from petty 
principles being best proportioned to petty trials, a 
heavenly spirit taking up its abode with us can alone 
sustain well the daily toils, and tranquilly pass the 
humiliations, of our condition ; and that, to keep the 
house of the soul in due order and pure, a god must 
come down and dwell within, as servant of all its 
work. 

Even in intellectual culture this principle receives 
illustration; and it will be found that the ripest 
knowledge is best qualified to instruct the most 
5 



60 



GREAT PRINCIPLES AXD SMALL DUTIES, 



complete ignorance. Ir is a common mistake to 
suppose, that those who know little suffice to inform 
those who know less; that the master who is but a 
stage before the pupil can, as well as another, show 
him the way ; nay, that there may even be an advan- 
tage in this near approach between the minds of 
teacher and of taught ; since the recollection of recent 
difficulties, and the vividness of fresh acquisition, give 
to the one a more living interest in the progress of 
the other. Of all educational errors, this is one of 
the gravest. The approximation required between 
the mind of teacher and of taught is not that of a 
common ignorance, but of mutual sympathy : not a 
partnership in narrowness of understanding, but that 
thorough insight of the one into the other, that 
orderly analysis of the tangled skein of thought, 
that patient and masterly skill in developing concep- 
tion after conception with a constant view to a 
remote result, which can only belong to comprehen- 
sive knowledge and prompt affections. With what- 
ever accuracy the recently initiated may give out 
his new stores, he will rigidly follow the precise 
method by which he made them his own : and will 
want that variety and fertility of resource, that 
command of the several paths of access to a truth, 
which are given by a thorough survey of the whole 
field on which he stands. The instructor needs to 
have a full perception, not merely of the internal 
contents, but also the external relations, of that 
which he unfolds ; as the astronomer knows but 
little, if, ignorant of the place and laws of the moon 
and sun. he has examined only their mountains and 
their spots. The sense of proportion between the 
different parts and stages of a subject, the appreci- 



GREAT PRINCIPLES AND SMALL DUTIES. 



51 



ation of the size and value of every step, the fore- 
sight of the direction and magnitude of the section 
that remains, are qualities so essential to the teacher, 
that without them all instruction is but an insult to 
the learner's understanding. And in virtue of these 
it is, that the most cultivated minds are usually the 
most patient, most clear, most rationally progressive ; 
most studious of accuracy in details, because not 
impatiently shut up within them as absolutely limit- 
ing the view, but quietly contemplating them from 
without in their relation to the whole. Neglect and 
depreciation of intellectual minutiae are characteris- 
tics of the ill-informed ; and where the granular parts 
of study are thrown away or loosely held, will be 
found no compact mass of knowledge solid and clear 
as crystal, but a sandy accumulation, bound together 
by no cohesion and transmitting no light. And 
above and beyond all the advantages which a higher 
culture gives in the mere system of communicating 
knowledge, must be placed that indefinable and 
mysterious power which a superior mind always puts 
forth upon an inferior; — that living and life-giving 
action, by which the mental forces are strengthened 
and developed, and a spirit of intelligence is pro- 
duced, far transcending in excellence the acquisition 
of any special ideas. In the task of instruction, so 
lightly assumed, so unworthily esteemed, no amount 
of wisdom would be superfluous and lost ; and even 
the child's elementary teaching would be best con- 
ducted, were it possible, by Omniscience itself. The 
more comprehensive the range of intellectual view, 
and the more minute the perception of its parts, the 
greater will be the simplicity of conception, the apti- 
tude for exposition, and the directness of access to 



52 GREAT PRINCIPLES AND SMALL DUTIES. 



the open and expectant mind. This adaptation to 
the humblest wants is the peculiar triumph of the 
highest spirit of knowledge. 

In the same way it is observable, that the trivial 
services of social life are best performed, and the 
lesser particles of domestic happiness are most skil- 
fully organized, by the deepest and the fairest heart. 
It is an error to suppose that homely minds are the 
best administrators of small duties. Who does not 
know how wretched a contradiction such a rule 
receives in the moral economy of many a home ? — 
how often the daily troubles, the swarm of blessed 
cares, the innumerable minutiae of arrangement in 
a family, prove quite too much for the generalship 
of feeble minds, and even the clever selfishness of 
strong ones ; how a petty and scrupulous anxiety, 
in defending with infinite perseverance, some small 
and almost invisible point of frugality and comfort, 
surrenders the greater unobserved, and while saving 
money ruins minds ; how, on the other hand, a 
rough and unmellowed sagacity rules indeed and 
without defeat, but while maintaining in action the 
mechanism of government, creates a constant and 
intolerable friction, a grating together of reluctant 
wills, a groaning under the consciousness of force, 
that make the movements of life fret and chafe in- 
cessantly? But where, in the presiding genius of 
a home, taste and sympathy unite (and in their 
genuine forms they cannot be separated) — the in- 
telligent feeling for moral beauty and the deep heart 
of domestic love, — with what ease, what mastery, 
what graceful disposition, do the seeming trivialities 
of existence fall into order, and drop a blessing as 
they take their place ! how do the hours steal away, 



GREAT PRINCIPLES AND SMALL DUTIES. 53 

unnoticed but by the precious fruits they leave ! and 
by the self-renunciations of affection, there comes a 
spontaneous adjustment of various wills ; and not an 
innocent pleasure is lost, nor a pure taste offended, 
nor a peculiar temper unconsidered ; and every day 
has its silent achievements of wisdom, and every 
night its retrospect of piety and love ; and the tran- 
quil thoughts that, in the evening meditation, come 
down with the starlight, seem like the serenade of 
angels, bringing in melody the peace of God ! 
Wherever this picture is realized, it is not by mi- 
croscopic solicitude of spirit, but by comprehension 
of mind, and enlargement of heart ; by that breadth 
and nicety of moral view which discerns everything 
in due proportion, and in avoiding an intense elabo- 
ration of trifles, has energy to spare for what is great ; 
in short, by a perception akin to that of God, whose 
providing frugality is on an infinite scale, vigilant 
alike in heaven and on earth ; whose art colors a 
universe with beauty, and touches with its pencil the 
petals of a flower. A soul thus pure and large dis- 
owns the paltry rules of dignity, the silly notions 
of great and mean, by which fashion distorts God's 
real proportions ; is utterly delivered from the spirit 
of contempt ; and in consulting for the benign ad- 
ministration of life, will learn many a task, and 
discharge many an office, from which lesser beings, 
esteeming themselves greater, would shrink as igno- 
ble. But in truth, nothing is degrading which a high 
and graceful purpose ennobles ; and offices the most 
menial cease to be menial, the moment they are 
wrought in love. What thousand services are ren- 
dered, aye, and by delicate hands, around the bed of 
sickness, which, else considered mean, become at 
5* 



54 



GREAT PRINCIPLES AND S 31 ALL DUTIES. 



once holy and quite inalienable rights. To smooth 
the pillow, to proffer the draught, to soothe, or to 
obey the fancies of the delirious will, to sit for hours 
as the mere sentinel of the feverish sleep; — these 
things are suddenly erected, by their relation to hope 
and life, into sacred privileges. And experience is 
perpetually bringing occasions, similar in kind though 
of less persuasive poignancy, when a true eye and a 
lovely heart will quickly see the relations of things 
thrown into a new position, and calling for a sacri- 
fice of conventional order to the higher laws of the 
affections ; and alike without condescension and 
without ostentation, will noiselessly take the post 
of gentle service and do the kindly deed. Thus is 
it that the lesser graces display themselves most 
richly, like the leaves and flowers of life, where there 
is the deepest and the widest root of love ; not like 
the staring and artificial blossoms of dry customs 
that, winter or summer, cannot change; but living 
petals, woven in nature's work-shop and folded by 
her tender skill, opening and shutting morning and 
night, glancing and trembling in the sunshine and 
the breeze. This easy capacity of great affections 
for small duties is the peculiar triumph of the high- 
est spirit of love. 

The same application of the loftiest principles to 
the most minute details is still more perceptible 
when we rise a step higher, and from the operations 
of knowledge and of love, turn to notice the agency 
of high religious faith. In the management and 
conquest of the daily disappointments and small 
vexations which befall every life, — the life of the idle 
and luxurious no less than of the busy and struggling, 
— only a devout mind attains to any real s access, and 



GREAT PRINCIPLES AND SMALL DUTIES. 55 

evinces a triumphant power. Who has not observed, 
how wonderfully the mere insect cares, that are ever 
on the wing in the noon-day heat of life, have power 
to sting and to annoy even the giant minds around 
which they sport, and to provoke them into the most 
unseemly war? The finest sense, the profoundest 
knowledge, the most unquestionable taste, often 
prove an unequal match for insignificant irritations ; 
and a man whose philosophy subdues nature, and 
whose force of thought and purpose gives him ascen- 
dency over men, may keep, in his own temper, an 
unvanquished enemy at home. Nor is this found 
only in cases of great self-ignorance, or impaired 
vigor in the moral sense. Even where the evil is 
self-confessed and felt as a perpetual shame, where 
the conscience sets up against it an honest and firm 
resistance, it is quite possible that very little progress 
may be made, and very little quietness attained. 
This is one of the many forms of Duty which mere 
moral conviction, however clear and strong, will fail 
to realize. You may be persuaded that it is wrong 
to be provoked ; you may repeat to yourself that it 
is useless; you may command your lips to silence, 
and breathe no angry word; yet withal the pertur- 
bation is not gone, but only dumb ; the conquest 
is not made, but the defeat concealed. There is 
nothing in the efforts of volition that has power to 
change the point of mental view ; these self-strivings 
do not lift you out of the level of your trial; you 
remain imprisoned in the midst of it, wrestle with 
its miseries as you may, — wanting the uplifting 
faith by which you escape from it, and look down 
upon it. It may be very absurd, nay very immoral, 
to be teazed by trifles ; but alas ! while you remain 



56 GREAT PRINCIPLES AND SMALL DUTIES. 

in the dust, reason as you may, it will annoy 
you: and there is no help for it, but to retire into 
a higher and grassier region, where the sultry road is 
visible from afar. We must go in contemplation out 
of life, ere we can see how its troubles subside, and 
are lost, like evanescent waves, in the deeps of eter- 
nity and the immensity of God. A mind that can 
make this migration from the scene by which it is 
surrounded, is removed from all vain strife of will, 
and gains its tranquillity without an effort : feels no 
difficulty in being gentle and serene, but rather 
wonders that it could ever be tempted from its pure 
repose. How welcome would it often be to many 
a child of anxiety and toil, to be suddenly transferred 
from the heat and din of the city, the restlessness and 
worry of the mart, to the midnight garden or the 
mountain top ! And like refreshment does a high 
faith, with its infinite prospects ever open to the 
heart, afford to the worn and weary : no laborious 
travels are needed for the devout mind ; for it carries 
within it Alpine heights and starlit skies, which it 
may reach at a moment's thought, and feel at once the 
loneliness of nature, and the magnificence of God. 

Nor is it only in the government of ourselves that 
high faith is found the most efficient aid for the less 
dignified duties. In the services which benevolence 
must render to others, the same truth is exemplified ; 
and the humblest and homeliest form of benevolence, 
attention to the grievances and sufferings of the 
body, receives its most powerful motive from the 
sublimest of all truths, the doctrine of human im- 
mortality. A different result might perhaps have 
been anticipated. It might have been thought, that 
for the truest sympathy with the pains of disease and 



GREAT PRINCIPLES AND SMALL DUTIES. 57 

the privations of infirmity, we must look to the 
disciples of materialism and annihilation ; that they 
who take the body to be our all, would most vehe- 
mently deplore its fragility, and most affectionately 
tend its decline ; that no love would be so faithful as 
that which believed, at the death-bed of a friend, that 
the real last look, the absolute farewell, was drawing 
nigh. On the theory of extinction, O with what 
close embrace would it seem natural to cling to each 
sinking life, — like kindred in shipwreck that cannot 
part ! The vivid expectation of futurity, which has 
so often led the believer to ascetic contempt for his 
own physical wants, would appear only consistent, if 
it passed by in equal scorn the bodily miseries of 
others. But it has not been so. In this, as in all 
the other instances, it appears, that the sublimest 
instruments of the mind are the best fitted to the 
most homely offices of duty; and that truths the 
most divine are the gentlest servitors of wants the 
most humiliating. In the eye of one who looks on 
his fellow-man as a compound being, the immortal 
element imparts, not meanness, but a species of 
sanctity, to the mortal; just as the worshipper feels 
that of the temple whose space has been set apart 
for God, the very stones are sacred, and the pave- 
ment claims a venerating tread. It is this constant 
penetration to the mind within, this recognition of 
something that is not seen, that overcomes the phys- 
ical repulsiveness of corporeal want and pain, and 
gives a tranquil patience to the Christian who 
watches the ravages of disease and the approach of 
death. Nay, when he sees the soul which is the heir 
of heaven prostrated and tortured by a wretched 
frame, he thinks it almost an indignity that so kingly 



5S GREAT PRINCIPLES AND SMALL DUTIES. 

a habitant should pine in so poor a cell, and a native 
of the light itself cry thus aloud in dark captivity ; 
and with touched and generous heart, he flies to the 
sufferer, with such help and succor as he may. 

Let us, then, cherish and revere the great sentiments 
which we assemble here to pour forth in worship, not 
as the occasional solace, or the weekly dignities of 
our existence ; but as truths that naturally penetrate 
to the very heart of life's activity, and best administer 
even the small frugalities of conscience. Nothing 
less than the majesty of God, and the powers of the 
world to come, can maintain the peace and sanctity 
of our homes, the order and serenity of our minds, 
the spirit of patience and tender mercy in our hearts. 
Then only shall we wisely economize moments when 
we anticipate for ourselves an eternity, and lose no 
grain of wisdom, when we discern the glorious and 
immortal structure which its successive accumula- 
tions shall raise. Then will even the merest drudgery 
of duty cease to humble us, when we transfigure it 
by the glory of our own spirit. Seek ye then the 
things that are above, where your life is hid with 
Christ in God. 



IV. 



EDEN AND GETHSEMANE. 
1 Cor. xv. 46. 

AND SO IT IS WRITTEN, THE FIRST MAN ADAM WAS MADE A LIVING 
SOUL j THE LAST ADAM WAS MADE A QUICKENING SPIRIT. HOW- 
BEIT THAT WAS NOT FIRST WHICH IS SPIRITUAL, BUT THAT WHICH 
IS NATURAL ; AND AFTERWARD THAT WHICH IS SPIRITUAL. 

Great and sacred was the day of Adam's birth : 
if for no other reason, yet for this, — that he was the 
first man, and had a living soul. The impressions 
received by the original human being, dropped silent- 
ly at dawn from infinite night upon this green earth, 
can never have been repeated. With maturity of 
powers, yet without a memory or a hope ; with full- 
eyed perception, yet without interpreting experience ; 
with all things new, yet without wonder, since also 
there was nothing old ; he was thrown upon those 
primitiye instincts by which God teaches the un- 
taught ; left to wander over his abode, and note the 
ever-living attitudes of nature : and from her bewil- 
dering mixture of the original with the repeated, from 
rest and weariness, from the confusion of waking and 
of dreams (both real alike to him), from the glow of 
noon and the fall of darkness and the night, from the 
summer shower and the winter snow, to disentangle 
some order at length, and recognize the elementary 
laws of the spot whereon he dwelt. 



60 



EDEN AND GETHSEMANE. 



Fast as five senses and a receiving mind would 
permit, did he find where he was, and when he came, 
and by what sort of scene he was environed; how 
the fair show of creation came round, each part in 
its own section of space and time, persuading him to 
notice and obey. And when he is thus the pupil 
of the external world, he is training to become its 
Lord, — by the discipline of submission learning the 
faculty of rule. Beneath the steady eye of human 
observation, nature becomes fascinated, and consents 
to be the menial and the drudge of man, doing the 
bidding of his wants and will, and apprenticing her 
illimitable power to his prescribing skill. And so 
was it given to the father of our race, for himself, 
and for his children, to subdue the earth, — to put 
forth the invisible force of his mind in conquest of 
its palpable energies, — to give the savage elements 
their first lesson as the domestic slaves of human 
life, and make "some rude advance towards that 
docility with which now they till and spin, and 
weave, and carry heavy burdens, with the fleetness 
of the winds and the precision of the hours. To a 
living and understanding soul, what was the unex- 
hausted world, but in itself a Paradise ? And was 
there aught else for its earliest inhabitant, but to 
discover what fruits he might open his bosom to 
receive from the universe around? Worthily does 
the Bible open with the story of Eden, the fresh 
dawn, the untrodden garden, of our life. Truly, too, 
whatever geologists may find and say, is that day 
identified with the general act of creation ; for, in no 
intelligible human sense, was there any universe, till 
there was a soul filled with the idea thereof. The 
system of things, of which Moses proposed to him- 



EDEN AND GETHSEMANE. 



61 



self to write the origin, was not a Saurian or a 
Mammoth's world, not such a creation as was pic- 
tured in the perceptions of huge reptiles and extinct 
fishes ; but such universe as the spirit of a man dis- 
cerns within, and so spreads without him; and of 
this it is certain, that the instant of his birth was the 
date of its creation. For had he been different, it 
would not have been the same ; had he been opposite, 
it would have been reversed ; and had he not been at 
all, it would not have appeared. Whatever is solemn 
in the apparition of the fair and infinite universe, 
belongs to the day of Adam's birth. 

Greater, however, and more sacred, was the day of 
Christ's birth ; of that ' second man,' as Paul says 
with glorious meaning, of that ' last Adam,' who 
was 1 a quickening spirit,' and the first parent of a 
new race of souls. He, too, was placed by the hand 
of God upon a fresh world, and commissioned to 
explore its silent and trackless ways, — to watch and 
rest in its darkness, and use and bless its light, — to 
learn by instincts divine and true, of its blossoms 
and its fruits, its fountains and its floods. But it 
was the world within, the untrodden forest of the 
soul where the consciousness of God hides itself in 
such dim light, and whispers with such mystic sound, 
as befit a region so boundless and primeval, — it was 
this, on which Jesus dwelt as the first inspired inter- 
preter. To him it was given, not to cast his eye 
around human life and observe by what scene it was 
encompassed ; but to retire into it, and reveal what it 
contained; not to disclose how man is materially 
placed, but ivhat he spiritually is ; to comprehend and 
direct, not his natural advantages of skill and physical 
power, but his grief, his hope, his strife, his love, his sin, 
6 



62 



EDEN AND GETHSEMA.XE. 



his worship. He was to find, not what comfort man 
may open his bosom to receive, but what blessing he 
may open his heart to give ; nay, what transforming 
light may go forth from the conscience and the faith 
within, to make the common earth divine, and exhibit 
around it the mountain heights of God's protection : 
to show us the Father, not as the great mechanic of 
the universe, whose arrangements we obey that we 
may use them ; but as the Holy Spirit that moves us 
with the sigh of infinite desires, and the prayer of 
ever conscious guilt, and the meek hope — that stays 
by us so long as we are absolutely true — of help 
and pity from the Holiest. And if the affections are 
as the colored window — near and small and of the 
earth — or far and vast and of the sky, through which 
we receive the images of all things, and find them 
change with the glass of our perceptions, how justly 
does the Apostle Paul deem the work of Christ ' a 
new creation ! ' If he that makes an eye, calls up 
the mighty phantom of the heavens and the earth : 
he that forms a soul within us, remodels our universe 
and reveals our God. Eden then is less sacred than 
the streets of Bethlehem and the fields of Nazareth ; 
though, as befits the cradle of the natural man who 
needs such things, its atmosphere might be purer, 
and its slopes more verdant. Indeed in all their 
adjuncts do we see the character of the two events, 
and how 1 afterwards alone came that which was 
spiritual.' When the first man heard the voice and 
step of the Most High, it was outwardly among the 
trees, as was natural to one born of the mere physical 
and constructing energy of God, without a mother 
and without a home ; when Jesus discerned the di- 
vine accents, the whispers of the Father were within 



EDEN AND GETHSEMANE. 



63 



him, the solemn articulation of the spirit infinitely 
affectionate and wise ; — a distinction altogether suit- 
able to one born of that mother who hid many things 
in her heart, — granted to us by that gentlest form 
of the Divine love, whence alone great and noble 
natures are ever nurtured. When Adam entered life, 
the earth was glad and jubilant; when Christ was 
born, the joy was testified by angels, and the anthem 
sounded from the sky. The 4 first man ' subdued 
the physical world ; the last man won the immortal 
heaven. 

Fellow-men and fellow- Christians, there is an Adam 
and a Christ within us all ; — a natural and a spiritual 
man, whereof the father of our race and the author 
of our faith are the respective emblems, both in the 
order of their succession, and the nature of their 
mission. We are endowed with powers of sense, of 
understanding, of action, by which we communicate 
with the scene of our present existence, and win tri- 
umphs over external and finite nature ; by which we 
appropriate and multiply the fruits of Providence 
permitted to our happiness. And we are conscious, 
however faintly, of aspirations and affections, of a 
faith and wonder, of a hope and sadness, which bear 
us beyond the margin of the earthly and finite, and 
afford some glimpse of the infinitude in which we 
live. By the one we go forth and discover our 
knowledge, by the other return within and learn our 
ignorance ; by the one we conquer nature, by the 
other we serve God ; by the one we shut ourselves 
up in life, by the other we look with full gaze through 
death ; by the one we acquire happiness, and sagacity, 
and skill, — by the other wisdom, and sanctity, and 
truth ; by the one we look on our position and all that 



64 



EDEN AND GETHSE3IANE. 



surrounds it with the eye of economy, — by the other, 
with the eye of love. Our first and superficial aim 
is to be, like Adam, lord below ; our last to be, like 
Christ, associate above. In short, the individual mind 
is conducted through a history like the sacred record 
of the general race, and, if it be just to its capacities, 
passes through a period of new creation ; and every 
noble life, like the Bible, (which is ' the book of life,') 
begins with Paradise, and ends with Heaven. 

Ere Jesus became the Christ, he was led into the 
desert to be tempted. And before the Messiah within 
us, — the messenger-spirit of God in the soul, — can 
make his inspiration felt, and render his voice articu- 
late and clear, we too must have been called to severe 
and lonely struggles with the power of sin. On no 
lighter terms can the natural man pass into the 
spiritual, and Deity shape forth a dwelling within the 
deeps of our humanity. In childhood, we live in 
God's creation, as in the unanxious shelter of some 
Eden ; the innocent in a garden of fruits, where the 
tillage demands no toil, and with smallest restraint, 
we have little else but to gather and enjoy; and he 
utmost duty is to abstain, rather than to do ; to keep 
the lips from forbidden fruits, not to spend the labor 
and sorrow of the brow or of the soul, to raise and 
multiply the bread of nature or of life. And many, 
alas ! there are, who make their life this sort of holi- 
day thing unto the end, and retain its childishness, — 
only, from the nature of the case, losing all its inno- 
cence ; strolling through it as a mere fruit-gathering 
place, a garden of indulgence, a Paradise sacred no 
more because empty now of God, and unvisited by 
the murmurs of his voice. 

There comes a time to us all, when the sense of 



EDEN AND GETHSEMANE. 



C5 



responsibility starts up and rebukes our anxiety for 
ease ; tells us that we are living fast, and once for 
all, a life that enlarges to the scale of eternity, and is 
embosomed everywhere in God ; bids us spring from 
our collapse of selfishness and sleep, take up the full 
dimensions of our strength, and go forth to do much, 
if it be possible, and at least to do worthily and well. 
And full often is the conflict terrible between the 
indolence of custom, the passiveness of self-will, and 
this inspiring impulse of the divine deliverer within 
us. Many a secret passage of our existence does it 
make bleak as the wilderness, and lonely as the 
Dead-Sea shore ; in many an hour of meditation, 
seemingly the stillest, does it inwardly tear us, as in 
the mid-strife of heaven and hell, and leave us wasted 
as with fasting nigh to death ; but oh ! if we are 
only true to the Spirit that declares ' we shall not 
live by bread alone;' if we quietly descend from the 
pinnacle of our pride (though sin may pretend to 
make it sacred and call it a turret of the temple) ; 
if we keep close to the meek appointed ways of Him 
whom our presumption must not try ; if we bend no 
knee to the majesty of splendid wrong, but in single 
allegiance to the Holiest, drive away the most glori- 
ous spirit of guilt that honors our strength with his 
assault ; — do we not find at length that angels come 
and minister unto us ; that the w T aste appears to 
vanish suddenly away, and the desert to blossom as 
the rose ; that we are restored as to a garden, not of 
the earth, but of the Lord, filled with the whispers of 
divinest peace ? And so our energy is born from the 
moments of weakness and of fear ; and were there 
no hell to tempt us, there were no heaven to bless. 
From the crisis of trembling and of doubt, we issue 

6* 



66 



EDEN AND GETHSEMAXE. 



forth to take up our mission gladly, with^the un- 
speakable shelter of God without us, and the hidden 
life of his love within us. 

Again : he who gave us the Gospel was ' the Man 
of Sorrows;' and the glad tidings of great joy were 
pronounced by a voice mellowed by many a sadness. 
And not otherwise is it with the messenger-spirit of 
our private hearts ; which does not become the 
Christ, the consecrated revealer of what is holy, 
unless it be much acquainted with grief. Heaven 
and God are best discerned through tears ; scarcely 
perhaps discerned at all without them. I do not 
mean that a man must be outwardly afflicted, and 
lose his comforts or his friends, before he can become 
devout. Many a Christian maintains the truest heart 
of piety without such dispensations ; and more, alas ! 
remain as hard and cold as ever in spite of them. 
That there is felt to be a general tendency, however, 
in the blow of calamity, and the sense of loss, to 
awaken the latent thought of God, and persuade us 
to seek his refuge, the current language of devotion 
in every age, the constant association of prayer with 
the hour of bereavement and the scenes of death, 
suffice to show. Yet is this effect of external distress 
only a particular instance of a general truth, viz., that 
religion springs up in the mind, wherever any of the 
infinite affections and desires press severely against 
the finite conditions of our existence. In ill-disciplined 
and contracted souls, this sorrowful condition is 
never fulfilled, except when some much-loved bless- 
ing is forcibly snatched away, and their human at- 
tachment (which is infinite) is surprised (though 
knowing it well before) at the violence of death, 
knocks with vain cries at the cruel barriers of our 



EDEN AND GETHSEMANE. 



67 



humanity, and is answered by the voice of mystery 
from beyond. 

But such was not the sorrow with which Christ 
was stricken : nor is such the only sorrow with which 
good and faithful minds are affected. There are 
many immeasurable affections of our nature, besides 
that which makes our kindred dear: — the yearning 
for truth, the delight in beauty, the veneration for 
excellence, the high ambition of conscience ever 
pressing forward yet unable to attain, — these also 
live within us, and strive unceasingly in noble 
hearts ; and there is an inner and a viewless sorrow, 
a spontaneous weeping of these infinite desires, 
whence the highest order of faith and devotion will 
be found to spring; so much so, that no one can 
even think of Christ, visibly social and cheerful as he 
was, without the belief of a secret sadness, that 
might be overheard in his solitary prayers. Those 
who make the end of existence to consist of happi- 
ness may try to conceal so perplexing a fact, and 
may draw pictures of the exceeding pleasantness of 
religion ; but human nature, trained in the school of 
Christianity, throws away as false the delineation of 
piety in the disguise of Hebe, and declares that there 
is something higher far than happiness; that thought, 
which is ever full of care and trouble, is better far ; 
that all true and disinterested affection, which often 
is called to mourn, is better still ; that the devoted 
allegiance of conscience to duty and to God, — 
which ever has in it more of penitence than of joy, — 
is noblest of all. 

If happiness means the satisfaction of desire (and 
I can conceive no other definition), then there is 
necessarily something greater, viz. religion, which 



68 



EDEN AND GETHSEMANE. 



implies constant yearning and aspiration, and there- 
fore non-satisfaction of desire. In truth that which 
is deemed the happiest period of life must pass away, 
before we can sink into the deep secrets of faith and 
hope. The primitive gladness of childhood is that 
of a bounded and limited existence, which earnestly 
wishes for nothing that exceeds the dimensions of 
possibility ; — of a human Paradise, about whose 
enclosure-line no inquiry is made ; and through sor- 
row and the sense of sin, we must issue from those 
peaceful gates, and make pilgrimage amid the thistle 
and the thorn, instead of the blossom and the rose ; 
and lie panting on the dust, instead of sleeping on 
the green sward of life, before we learn through 
mortal weakness our immortal strength, and feel 
in the exile of the earth the shelter of the skies. 
Then, however, the spirit of Christ, the Man of Sor- 
rows, gives us a rebirth of joy through tears. Be- 
fore, we were simply unconscious of death ; then, we 
enter into the consciousness of immortality. Before, 
our will was restrained by a law which we could not 
keep ; then, it is emancipated by a fresh love that 
more than keeps it; whose free inclination goes be- 
fore all precept and authoritative faith ; and hopeth 
all things, believeth all things, endureth all things ; 
nay, even can do all things, through the Christ who 
strengtheneth it. 

Children then of nature, we are also sons of God ; 
born of the genial earth, we are to climb the glorious 
heaven ; and to the human lot that makes us of one 
blood with Adam, is added the divine liberty of 
being of one spirit with Christ. That liberty we can- 
not decline, for we are conscious of it now; and if 
we look not on it as on the face of an angel, it will 



EDEN AND GETHSEMANE. 



69 



haunt us with its gaze like the eye of a fiend. The 
severe prerogatives of an existence half divine are 
ours. To wear away life in unproductive harmless- 
ness is innocent no more ; with the glory we take the 
cross; and instead of slumbering at noon in Eden, 
must keep the midnight watch within Gethsemane. 
We, too, like our great leader, must be made perfect 
through suffering; but the struggle by night will 
bring the calmness of the morning ; the hour of 
exceeding sorrow will prepare the day of godlike 
strength ; the prayer for deliverance calls down the 
power of endurance. And while to the reluctant 
their cross is too heavy to be borne, it grows light 
to the heart of willing trust. The faithful heirs of 
' the Man of Sorrows,' transcending the trials they 
cannot decline, may quit the world with the cry 1 it 
is finished,' and pass through the silence of death to 
the peace of God. 



SORROW XO SIN. 



LrKE xxiii. 23. 

BUT JESUS, TURNING UNTO THEM, SAID, DAUGHTERS OE JERUSALEM, 
TTEEP XOT EOR IBB, BUT TTEEP EOR YOURSELVES AXD FOR TOUR 
CHILDREN. 

Christ, then, could invite to tears; to tears over 
departing excellence ; to tears which men idly call 
selfish ; tears ' for themselves and for their children.' 
He whose mission it was to teach the Paternity of 
Providence, and the serenity of the immortal hope, — 
he who himself lived in the divinest peace which 
they can give, thought it no treason to these truths 
to weep. To the eye of the Man of Sorrows, sor- 
row was no sin ; nor did he, who was emphatically 
the Son of God, see, in even the passionate utterance 
of grief, any of that spirit of filial distrust towards 
God and reluctant acceptance of his will, which 
have often been charged on it by the hard and cold 
temper of his followers. Religious professors have 
put their own congenial interpretation on the morality 
of Christ; and being themselves — but too frequently 
— unfeeling and unsocial mystics, they have multi- 
plied the penances of natural emotion, and sublimed 
from the Gospel its pure humanities. If we accept 
their representations, our religion aims to cancel our 
natural aflections, and substitute others at variance 
with them ; the impulses of gladness and grief are 



SORROW NO SIN. 



71 



alike to be condemned as a rebel love of perishable 
things ; the most agitating passages of our being, 
which convulse us to the centre, are to be met with 
a rigid and tearless piety; the future, though invisible 
and intangible, though approachable only by kindled 
imagination, is to be acknowledged as the only 
region of the fair and good, and to supersede all 
other claims upon our desire and regard. The pres- 
ent, though the intensest point of existence, is to be 
comparatively unfelt ; and the past, whereof the 
retrospect is sweet and solemn to the travelled pil- 
grim, — the history of childhood and its unforgotten 
friendships, of youth and its unchecked aspirations, 
of maturity with its worn yet deeper love, its more 
crushing yet worthier anxieties, its purer but more 
melancholy wisdom, — all this, because it is human 
and not divine, of earth and not of heaven, is to be 
refused the tribute of a sigh. 

For my own part, regarding our human nature as 
the image of its divine parent, and in nothing more 
truly that image than in the impulses of its disinter- 
ested love, I bend in reverence before the emotions 
of every melted heart ; believing this present life to 
be the worthy childhood of futurity, conceiving its 
interests, its happiness, to be substantially the same, 
but framed upon a smaller scale, and clouded with a 
deeper shade, I see in its history nothing trivial, in 
its events nothing contemptible, in its vicissitudes 
nothing unworthy of a man's profoundest thought. 
And taking the Gospel to afford a promise not of 
the extinction of human nature in heaven, but of its 
perpetuity, — an assurance not that we shall be con- 
verted into chill and pious phantoms, but simply 
elevated into immortal men, — I would gather from 



72 



SORROW NO SIN. 



that hope a deeper veneration for all the pure tastes 
and natural feelings of a good mind : I would main- 
tain the sanctity of human joy and human grief: 
I would protest against all stern censure on the 
outbreaks of true sorrow ; and would plead that 
to mourn, — aye, and with broken spirit, — the de- 
parture of virtue and of love, is — not a resistance 
to a Father's will, not an oblivion of his Providence, 
not the expression of an ignoble selfishness, not a 
mistrust of a restoring heaven; but only a fitting 
homage to God's most benignant gifts, the grateful 
glance of a loving eye on blessings, than which 
nothing more holy, more peaceful, more exalting, is 
conferred by a guardian benevolence on man. 

Those who blame as unchristian the deep grief 
which bereavement awakens, must extend their dis- 
approbation much further, and censure all strong 
human attachments. Sorrow is not an independent 
state of mind, standing unconnected with all others. 
It could not be cancelled singly, leaving all other 
qualities of our nature in their integrity. It is the 
effect, and under the present conditions of our being 
the inevitable effect, of strong affections. Nay, it 
is not so much their result, as a certain attitude of 
those affections themselves. It not simply floius 
from the love of excellence, of wisdom, of sympa- 
thy, but it is that very love, when conscious that 
excellence, that wisdom, that sympathy, have de- 
parted. The more intense the delight in their 
presence, the more poignant must be the impression 
of their absence : and you cannot destroy the an- 
guish, unless you forbid the joy. Grief is only the 
memory of widowed affection ; and nothing but a 
draft of utter oblivion could lap it in insensibility. 



SORROW NO SIN. 



73 



When the ties of strong and refined attachment have 
long bound us to a home ; when the sympathies of 
those who share with us that home have become as 
the needful light to our daily toil, and the guardian 
spirits of our nightly rest ; when years have passed 
on, and brought us many a sickness banished by their 
fidelity, many a danger averted by their counsels, 
many an anxiety rendered tolerable by their partici- 
pation ; when often they too have gazed on us from 
the bed of pain, and threatened to depart, but we 
have been permitted to rescue them from the grave, 
and therein have doubled all our tenderness ; when 
from this close inspection of pure hearts, we have 
learned to think nobly of human nature, and hope- 
fully of the Providence of God ; when their voices, 
common enough to other ears, but fraught to us with 
unnumbered memories of life, have become the nat- 
ural music of the earth ; — can this melody be silent, 
can these virtues depart, can these remembrances 
be deprived of their living centre, without leaving us 
trembling and desolate? Can all these fibres of our life 
be thus wrenched, and not bleed at every pore? And 
to forget, ■ — it cannot be. We daily pass through 
places which are the shrine of a thousand recollec- 
tions ; we are startled by tones which pour on us a 
flood of conviction; we open a book, and there is 
the very name ; we write a date, and it is an anni- 
versary. These associations with the past, — I do 
not say excite sorrow, but to an affectionate mind 
are sorrow. The morality then which rebukes sor- 
row, rebukes love. It is useless expatiating on the 
evils which strong grief inflicts on ourselves and 
others : you are bound to show that the affections, 
of which it is an inseparable form, contain no coun- 
7 



74 



SORROW NO SIX. 



teracting good ; that it is more blessed, more holy, 
to freeze up the springs of emotion, than to suffer 
them perennially to fertilize our natnre, though they 
sometimes deluge it ; that it is better to keep loose 
from all that is human, and love nothing that we 
may lose. You cannot sever them : grief and love 
must stay or go together. And who can doubt that 
that is the truest duty to God which permits to us 
the most disinterested heart for each other ; that the 
purest devotion which sanctifies, and not chills our 
affections ; that the most genuine trust, which dares 
to cultivate to the utmost sympathies wounded here, 
and. serenely blest only hereafter; that the most filial 
hope which regarded the brotherhood of man as an 
inference from the paternity of God, looks to heaven 
as to another home. 

There are doubtless cases not infrequent, in which 
the mind is unduly overpowered by affliction ; in 
which the tranquillity of the reason is wholly overset, 
and the energy of the will utterly prostrated. Here, 
beyond controversy, is a state of mind morally 
wrong ; for God never absolves us from our duties, 
however he may sadden them. But to rebuke the 
feelings of grief in such a case is to cast the censure 
in the wrong place ; it is not that the sorrow is ex- 
cessive, but that other emotions are defective in their 
strength. Nor is the distinction merely verbal and 
trivial. For the natural effect of such misplaced 
blame surely is, that the sufferer will endeavor simply 
to abate the intensity of his sorrow, to extrude from 
his mind the emotions which are charged with guilty 
excess ; his aim will be purely negative, not to think 
so fixedly, not to feel so profoundly, respecting the 
bereavement which has fallen upon his life. And 



SORROW NO SIN. 



75 



this aim is directed to an end both undesirable and 
impracticable. It is undesirable ; for to touch the 
working of affections with partial torpor, to benumb 
the tenderness without adding to the energy of the 
mind, to deaden the susceptibility of memory with- 
out quickening the vividness of hope, would surely 
be no improvement to the character ; it would be a 
mere deduction from the amount of mind ; and sor- 
row is at least better than dulness of soul. It is, 
moreover, impracticable ; for our nature affords us no 
means of exciting a negative and destructive action 
upon our own characters. One class of feelings 
can be extinguished only by the creation of another ; 
one sentiment banished only by inviting the antago- 
nism of another; one interest supplanted only by the 
stronger occupancy of another. So long as this is 
unperceived, the over-grieving heart will seek in vain 
to discipline itself. Thinking of its sorrow as too 
much, instead of its sense of duty as too little, it 
fails to meet pointedly its own remedy. The will 
feebly casts about its efforts in the dark regions of 
the mind ; wastes its vigor in trying to forget ; some- 
times fancies forgetfulness; then pretends it; assumes 
a hollow tranquillity, and affects to itself and others 
an interest in topics and in duties which are not 
truly loved, for they have never been truly and dis- 
tinctly sought. From all such aimless directions of 
the will there arises a far greater evil than simple 
failure ; an unconscious insincerity grows up, a hazy 
perception of our real mental condition, a confusion 
of actual and fictitious feelings, of emotions which 
we merely imagine with those which we truly expe- 
rience, than which few states of character can be 
more perilous to moral power and progress. The 



1 



76 



SOKEOW NO SIN. 



wise interpreter of his own nature will let his mourn- 
ing affections alone. To interfere with them would 
be wrestling with his own strength. But he will 
draw forth, into prominent light, sentiments now 
sleeping idly in the shaded recesses of his mind. 
He will summon up the sense of responsibility, to 
rouse him with the spectacle of his relations to God 
his Father, and his brother, man ; to recount to him 
the deeds of duty and the toils of thought, which are 
yet to be achieved ere life is done ; to show him the 
circle of high faculties, which the Creator has given 
him to ennoble and refine, and keep ready for a world 
where thought and virtue are immortalized. He will 
call forth his affections for the living who surround 
him, and whom yet it is his happiness to love, and 
his obligation to bless. And these sympathies will 
be fruitful in work for his hands, and interests re- 
freshing to his heart. To preserve in his home the 
graceful order of pure and peaceful affections ; to 
omit in the world no delicate attention of friendship; 
to forget not the claims of poverty, and ignorance, 
and sin, to the compassion of all who would be faith- 
ful to their kind; — -here are invitations enough to 
the aspirings of benevolence, to bid the drooping soul 
look up. And the sufferer will evoke the spirit of 
Christian trust and hope. For, as the memory of 
bereaved affection is grief, so is its hope the restorer 
of peace ; from the past is forced on us the sense of 
loss ; from the future rises the expectation of recov- 
ery ; in traversing the past, our thoughts glide along 
a procession of dear events arrested by a tomb ; in 
conceiving of the future, they behold the same events 
opening into renewed being, and spreading them- 
selves in all blessed varieties along the vistas of 



SORROW NO SIN. 



77 



interminable life ; the sadness of each successive 
point of remembrance are reversed, its losses regath- 
ered ; its tears, as it were, unwept before the smile of 
God ; its plaints unsung amid the harmonies of 
heaven ; its sins untwined by the wounding yet 
healing hand of an angel penitence. Invoke the 
spirit of this trust ; and though sorrow may not dry 
its tears, it rises to a dignity above despair. 

It is not unusual to speak of sorrow for the dead 
as expressing a distrust of the Providence of God, 
and a doubt of an eternal hereafter. In this, how- 
ever, there is but little truth. True it is, wherever 
the reason actually disbelieves the great facts of a 
Divine government and human immortality, bereave- 
ment must indeed fall upon the heart with terrific 
weight. It is then a blow of tyrannic fate, a visible 
stroke of annihilation, a triumph of pure and final 
evil ; and were it not that the mind of hopeless un- 
belief usually permits the susceptibility of its affec- 
tions to grow dull, and seeks protection from the 
tenor of its views by a spontaneous incasement of 
insensibility, its impressions from death would be 
appalling. But though unbelief may be a natural 
cause of uncontrolled sorrow, it by no means follows 
that such sorrow implies unbelief. It is easy to say, 
that if we acknowledged God to be good in all his 
dispensations, and trusted in some blessed spirit 
secreted in the present loss, we could not deeply 
mourn. I ask, is it reasonable to expect this abstract 
conviction to overpower a visible privation? As- 
suage and sanctify the grief it unquestionably will ; 
but to heal entirely is beyond its power. The va- 
cancy in home and heart is a thing felt ; its issue in 
good is a thing believed in and imagined ; that the 



78 



SORROW NO SIX. 



blessings of the past are gone, is a reality in the 
present ; that they will be restored is as yet but a 
vision in the future. The degree in which faith 
imparts consolation will somewhat depend on the 
natural vigor of the imaginative faculty ; affliction is 
a pressure of actual experience ; faith is a series of 
mental creations ; its realities are invisible and intan- 
gible ; a mind bound down by the chain of experi- 
ence, a mind whose memory is more faithful than its 
conceptions are excursive, will catch but faint and 
distant glimpses of the blessed idealities of hope. 
And without one moment's murmuring against the 
benignity of God, or doubt respecting his promised 
future, such a mind may be ill able to reach the ever- 
flowing fountain of his peace. 

Nor is it less unjust to prefer against sorrow for 
the dead the charge of selfishness. Selfish ! What, 
that pure affection bowed and broken to the earth ! 
Yearning only to discharge again, were it possible, 
but the humblest service of love ! What would it 
not do, what sacrifice of self would it not make, 
what toils, what watching, would it not hold light, 
might it be permitted -to perform one office for the 
departed ! — unseen, unfelt, unheard, without the 
hope of a requiting smile, to shed on that spirit one 
silent blessing ! Surely this insult to human grief 
must be the invention of cold hearts, needing a justi- 
fication for their own insensibility. True it is, there 
is no need to mourn for those who are removed. 
True it is, we weep not for them, but for ourselves 
and for our children. It is we only that suffer and 
are sad. But emotions are not selfish, simply be- 
cause they are experienced by ourselves ; were it so, 
every joy and sorrow would be branded by that 



SORROW NO SIN. 



79 



odious name. They are selfish only when they are 
full of the idea of self, — when self is their object, 
as well as their subject; when they tempt us to 
prefer our own personal and exclusive happiness to 
that of others, and to trample on a brother's feelings 
in the chase after our own good. Of this there is 
nothing in the tears of bereavement ; they are the 
tribute not of our self-regarding but of our sym- 
pathetic nature. At last, indeed, when the burst of 
grief has had its natural way, they lead us to a gen- 
erous joy. For, as we weep, we think how blessed 
are the departed, who ' rest from their labors, while 
their works do follow them ; ' their pure hearts jarred 
no more by the harshnesses of this oft discordant life ; 
their earnest minds drinking of the perennial fount 
of truth ; their frailties cast away with the coil of 
mortality they have left behind ; their sainted love 
waiting to receive us, as we too may one by one 
pass the dark limits which sever us from their em- 
brace, and seek with them the peace and progress of 
the skies. 



VI. 



CHRISTIAN PEACE. 
John xiy. 27. 

PEACE I LEAVE "WITH YOU '. MY PEACE I GIVE UNTO YOU I NOT AS THE 
"WORLD GIVETH, GIVE I UNTO YOU. 

This was a strange benediction to proceed from 
the Man of Sorrows, at the dreariest moment of his 
life; — strange at least to those who look only to his 
outward career, his incessant contact with misery and 
sin, his absolute solitude of purpose, his lot stricken 
with sadness ever new from the temptation to the 
cross ; — but not strange perhaps to those who heard 
the deep and quiet tones in which this oracle of 
promise went forth, — the divinest music from the 
centre of the darkest fate. He was on the bosom of 
the beloved disciple, and in the midst of those who 
should have cheered him in that hour with such com- 
forts as fidelity can always offer ; but who, failing in 
their duty to his griefs, found the sadness creep upon 
themselves; while he, seeking to give peace to them, 
found it himself profusely in the gift. It was not till 
he had finished this interview and effort of affection, 
and from the warmth of that evening meal and the 
flush of its deep converse they had issued into the 
chill and silent midnight air, not till the sanctity of 
moonlight (never to be seen by him again) had in- 
vested him, and coarse fatigue had sunk his disciples 



CHRISTIAN PEACE. 



81 



Into sleep upon the grass, that having none to com- 
fort, he found the anguish fall upon himself. Deprived 
of the embrace of John, he flew to the bosom of the 
Father ; and after a momentary strife, recovered in 
trust the serenity he had found in toil ; and while his 
followers lie stretched in earthly slumber, he reaches a 
divine repose; while they, yielding to nature, gain nei- 
ther strength nor courage for the morrow, he, through 
the vigils of agony, rises to that godlike power, on 
which mockery and insult beat in vain, and which 
has made the cross, — then the emblem of abjectness 
and guilt, — the everlasting symbol of whatever is 
Holy and Sublime. 

The peace of Christ, then, was the fruit of combined 
toil and trust; in the one case diffusing itself from the 
centre of his active life, in the other from that of his 
passive emotions ; enabling him in the one case to do 
things tranquilly, in the other to see things tranquilly. 
Two things only can make life go wrong and pain- 
fully with us ; w^hen we suffer or suspect misdirection 
and feebleness in the energies of love and duty within 
us, or in the Providence of the world without us : 
bringing, in the one case, the lassitude of an unsatis- 
fied and discordant nature ; in the other the melan- 
choly of hopeless views. For these Christ delivers us 
by a summons to mingled toil and trust. And here- 
in does his peace differ from that which 'the world 
giveth,' — that its prime essential is not ease, but 
strife; not self-indulgence, but self-sacrifice; not ac- 
quiescence in evil for the sake of quiet, but conflict 
with it for the sake of God ; not, in short, a prudent 
accommodation of the mind to the world, but a reso- 
lute subjugation of the world to the best conceptions 
of the mind. Amply has the promise to leave behind 



82 



CHRISTIAN PEACE. 



him such a peace been since fulfilled. It was fulfilled 
to the apostles who first received it ; and has been 
realized again by a succession of faithful men to 
whom they have delivered it. 

The word 'Peace' denotes the absence of jar and 
conflict ; a condition free from the restlessness of fruit- 
less desire, the forebodings of anxiety, the stings of 
enmity. It may be destroyed by discordance between 
the lot without and the mind within, where the human 
being is in an obviously false position, — an evil rare 
and usually self-curative; or by a discordance wholly 
interna], among the desires and affections themselves. 
The first impulse of 'the natural man' is, to seek 
peace by mending his external condition; to quiet 
desire by increase of ease; to banish anxiety by in- 
crease of wealth ; to guard against hostility by making 
himself too strong for it ; to build up his life into a 
fortress of security and a palace of comfort, where he 
may softly lie, though tempests beat and rain de- 
scends. The spirit of Christianity casts away at once 
this whole theory of peace ; declares it the most chi- 
merical of dreams ; and proclaims it impossible even 
to make this kind of reconciliation between the soul 
and the life wherein it acts. As well might the 
athlete demand a victory without a foe. To the 
noblest faculties of soul, rest is disease and torture. 
The understanding is commissioned to grapple with 
ignorance, the conscience to confront the powers of 
moral evil, the affections to labor for the wretched 
and oppressed; nor shall any peace be found, till 
these, which reproach and fret us in our most ela- 
borate ease, put forth an incessant and satisfying 
energy; till instead of conciliating the world, we 
vanquish it ; and rather than sit still, in the sickness 



CHRISTIAN PEACE. 



83 



of luxury, for it to amuse our perceptions, we pre- 
cipitate ourselves upon it to mould it into a new 
creation. Attempt to make all smooth and pleasant 
without, and you thereby create the most corroding 
of anxieties, and stimulate the most insatiable of ap- 
petites within. But let there be harmony within, let 
no clamors of self drown the voice which is entitled 
to authority there, let us set forth on the mission of 
duty, resolved to live for it alone, to close with every 
resistance that obstructs it, and march through every 
peril that awaits it; and in the consciousness of im- 
mortal power, the sense of mortal ill will vanish; and 
the peace of God well nigh extinguish the sufferings 
of the man. 'In the world we may have tribulation; 
in Christ we shall have peace.' 

This peace, so remote from torpor, — arising indeed 
from the intense action of the greatest of all ideas, 
those of duty, of immortality, of God, — fell accord- 
ing to the promise on the first disciples. Not in vain 
did Jesus tell them in their sorrows that the Com- 
forter would come; nor falsely did he define this bless- 
ed visitant, as 'the spirit of truth,' — the soul rever- 
entially faithful to its convictions, and expressing 
clearly in action its highest aspirings. Such peace 
had Stephen, when before the Sanhedrim that was 
striving to hush up the recent story of the Cross, he 
proclained aloud the sequel of the Ascension ; and 
priests and elders arose and stopped their ears, and 
thrust him out to death; — he had this peace; else 
how, if a heaven of divinest tranquillity had not 
opened to him and revealed to him the proximity 
of Christ to God, how, as the stone struck his un- 
covered and uplifted head, could he have so calmly 
said, ' Lord, lay not this sin to their charge ? ' Such 



84 



CHRISTIAN PEACE. 



peace had Paul, — at least when he ceased to rebel 
against his noble nature, and became, instead of 
the emissary of persecution, the ambassador of God. 
Was there ever a life of less ease and security, 
yet of more buoyant and rejoicing spirit, than his? 
What weight did he not cast aside, to run the race 
that was set before him ? What tie of home or 
nation did he not break, that he might join in one 
the whole family of God ? For forty years the scoff 
of synagogues and the outcast of his people, he for- 
got the privations of the exile in the labors of the 
missionary; flying from charges of sedition he dis- 
seminated the principles of peace; persecuted from 
city to city, he yet created in each a centre of pure 
worship and Christian civilization, and along the 
coasts of Asia, and colonies of Macedonia, and cita- 
dels of Greece, dropped link after link of the great 
chain of truth that shall yet embrace the world. 
Amid the joy of making converts, he had also the 
affliction of making martyrs; to witness the suffer- 
ings, perhaps to bear the reproaches, of survivors; 
with weeping heart to rebuke the fears, and sustain 
the faith, of many a doubter; and in solitude and 
bonds to send forth the effusions of his earnest spirit 
to quicken the life, and renovate the gladness, of the 
confederate churches. Yet when did speculation at 
its ease ever speak with vigor so noble and cheerful- 
ness so fresh, as his glorious letters; which recount 
his perils by land and sea, his sorrows with friend and 
foe, and declared that 'none of these things move' 
him ; which show him projecting incessant work, yet 
ready for instant rest ; conscious that already he has 
fought the good fight, and willing to finish his course 
and resign the field; but prepared, if needs be, to 



CHRISTIAN PEACE. 



85 



grasp again the sword of the spirit, and go forth in 
quest of wider victories. Does any one suppose, 
that it would have been more peaceful to look back 
on a life less exposed and adventurous ? on a lot 
sheltered and secure ? on soft bedded comfort, and 
unbroken plenty, and conventional compliance? No! 
it is only beforehand that we mistake these things for 
peace: in the retrospect we know them better, and 
would exchange them all for one vanquished tempta- 
tion in the desert, for one patient bearing of the cross ! 
What, — when all is over, and we lie upon the last 
bed, — what is the worth to us of all our guilty com- 
promises, of all the moments stolen from duty to be' 
given to ease ? If Paul had cowered before the tri- 
bunal of Nero, and trembled at his comrades' blood, 
and, instead of baring his neck to the imperial sword 
had purchased by poor evasions another year of life, 
— where would that year have been now ? — a lost 
drop in the deep waters of time, — yet not lost, but 
rather mingled as a poison in the refreshing stream 
of good men's goodness by which Providence fertil- 
izes the ages. 

The peace of Christ, thus inherited by his disci- 
ples, and growing out of a living spirit of duty and 
of love, contrasts, not merely with guilty ease, but 
with that mere mechanical facility in blameless ac- 
tion which habit gives. There is something faithless 
and ignoble in the very reasonings sometimes em- 
ployed to recommend virtuous habits. They are 
urged upon us, because they smooth the way of 
right ; we are invited to ihem for the sake of ease. 
Adopted in such a temper, duty after all makes its 
bargain with indulgence, and is not yet pursued for 
its own sake and with the allegiance of a loving 
8 



86 



CHRISTIAN PEACE. 



heart. Moreover, whoever has a true conscience sees 
that there is a fallacy in this persuasion ; for when- 
ever habits become mechanical, they cease to satisfy 
the requirements of duty ; the obligations of which 
enlarge indefinitely with our powers, demanding an 
undiminished tension of the will, and an ever-con- 
stant life of the affections. It can never be, that a 
soul which has a heaven open to its view, which is 
stationed here, not simply to accommodate itself to 
the arrangements of this world, but also to school 
itself for the spirit of another, is intended to rest in 
mere automatic regularities. When the mind is 
thrown into other scenes, and finds itself in the 
society of the world invisible, suddenly introduced 
to the heavenly wise and the sainted good, — what 
peace can it expect from mere dry tendencies to acts 
no longer practicable, and blameless things now left 
behind ? No ; it must have that pure love which is 
nowhere a stranger, in earth or heaven ; that vital 
goodness of the affections, that adjusts itself at once 
to every scene where there is truth and holiness to 
venerate; that conscience, wakeful and devout, which 
enters with instant joy on any career of duty and 
progress opened to its aspirations. And even in ' the 
life that now is,' the mere mechanist of virtue, who 
copies precepts with mimetic accuracy, is too fre- 
quently at fault, to have even the poor peace which 
custom promises. He is at home only on his own 
beat. An emergency perplexes him, and too often 
tempts him disgracefully to fly. He wants the in- 
ventiveness by which a living heart of duty seizes 
the resources of good, and uses them to the last ; 
and the courage by which love, like honor, starts to 
the post of noble danger, and maintains it till, by 



CHRISTIAN PEACE. 



87 



such fidelity, it becomes a place of clanger no more. 
It is a vain attempt to comprise in rules and aphor- 
isms all the various moral exigencies of life. Hardly 
does such legality suffice to define the small portion 
of right and wrong contemplated in human jurispru- 
dence. But the true instincts of a pure mind, like 
the creative genius of art, frames rules most perfect 
in the act of obeying them, and throws the materials 
of life into the fairest attitudes and the justest pro- 
portions. He whose allegiance is paid to the mere 
preceptive system, shapes and carves his duty into 
the homeliest of wooden idols; he who has the spirit 
of Christ turns it into an image breathing and di- 
vine. Children of God in the noblest sense, we are 
not without something of his creative spirit in our 
hearts. The power is there, to separate the light 
from the darkness within us, and set in the firma- 
ment of the soul luminaries to guide and gladden 
us, for seasons and for years ; power to make the 
herbage green beneath our feet, and beckon happy 
creatures into existence around our path ; power to 
mould the clay of our earthly nature into the like- 
ness of God most High ; and thus only have we 
power to look back in peace upon our work, and find 
a sabbath rest upon the thought, that, morning and 
evening, all is good. 

But the peace which Christ felt and bequeathed 
was the result of trust, no less than toil. However 
immersed in action, and engaged in enterprises of 
conscience, every life has its passive moments, when 
the operation is reversed, and power, instead of going 
from us, returns upon us ; and the scenes of our 
existence present themselves to us as objects of 
speculation and emotion. Sometimes we are forced 



CHEISTIAN PEACE. 



into quietude in pauses of exhaustion or of grief: 
stretched upon the bed of pain, to hear the great 
world murmuring and rolling by; or lifted into the 
watch-tower of solitude, to look over the vast plain 
of humanity, and from a height that covers it with 
silence, observe its groups shifting and traversing like 
spirits in a city of the dead. At such times, our 
peace must depend on the view under which our 
faith or our fears may exhibit this mighty ' field of 
the world:' on the forces of evil, of fortuity, or of 
God, which we suppose to be secretly directing the 
changes on the scene, and calling up the brief appa- 
rition of generation after generation. And so great 
and terrible is the amount of evil, physical and moral, 
in the great community of men ; so vast the numbers 
sunk in barbarism, compared with the few who more 
nobly represent our nature ; so many and piercing 
(could we but hear them) the cries of un pitied 
wretchedness, that with every beat of the pendulum 
wander unnoticed into the air; so dense the crowds 
that are thrust together in the deepest recesses of 
want, and that crawl through the loathsome hives of 
sin ; that only two men can look through the world 
without dismay ; he, on the one hand, who suffering 
himself to be bewildered with momentary horror, 
and in the confusion of his emotions, to mistake 
what he sees for a moral chaos, turns his back in the 
despair of fatalism, crying, ' let us eat and drink, for 
to-morrow we die ; ' and he, on the other, who, with 
the discernment of a deeper wisdom, penetrates 
through the shell of evil to the kernel and the seed 
of good ; who perceives in suffering and temptation 
the resistance which alone can render virtue mani- 
fest, and conscience great, and existence venerable ; 



CHRISTIAN PEACE. 



89 



who recognizes, even in the gigantic growth of 
guilt, the grasp of infinite desires, and the perver- 
sion of godlike capacities ; who sees how soon, 
were God to take rip his Omnipotence, and snatch 
from his creature man the care of the world and the 
work of self-perfection, all that deforms might be 
swept away, and the meanest lifted through the 
interval that separates them from the noblest ; and 
who therefore holds fast to the theory of hope, and 
the kindred duty of effort ; takes shelter beneath 
the universal Providence of God ; and seeing time 
enough in his vast cycles for the growth and con- 
summation of every blessing, can be patient as well 
as trust ; can resign the selfish vanity of doing all 
things himself, and making a finish before he dies ; 
and cheerfully give his life to build up the mighty 
temple of human improvement, though no inscrip- 
tion mark it for glory, and it be as one of the hid- 
den stones of the sanctuary, visible only to the eye 
of God. Such was the spirit and the faith which 
Jesus left, and in which his first disciples found 
their rest. Within the infinitude of the divine 
mercy trouble did but fold them closer ; the per- 
versity of man did but provoke them to put forth 
a more conquering love; and though none were 
ever more the sport of the selfish interests and 
prejudices of mankind, or came into contact with 
a more desolate portion of the great wastes of 
humanity, they constructed no melancholy theories; 
but having planted many a rose of Sharon, and 
made their little portion of the desert smile, departed 
in the faith, that the green margin would spread as 
the seasons of God came round, till the mantle of 

8* 



90 



CHRISTIAN PEACE. 



heaven covered the earth, and it ended with Eden 
as it had begun. 

Between these two sources of Christian peace, 
virtuous toil, and holy trust, there is an intimate 
connection. The desponding are generally the indo- 
lent and useless ; not the tried and struggling, but 
speculators at a distance from the scene of things, 
and far from destitute of comforts themselves. Bar- 
ren of the most blessed of human sympathies, 
strangers to the light that best gladdens the heart 
of man, they are without the materials of a bright 
and hopeful faith. But he who consecrates himself, 
sees at once how God may sanctify the world ; he 
whose mind is rich in the memory of moral victo- 
ries, will not easily believe the world a scene of 
moral defeats ; nor was it ever known that one who, 
like Paul, labored for the good of man, despaired of 
the benevolence of God. 

Whoever then would have the peace of Christ, 
let him seek first the spirit of Christ. Let him not 
fret against the conditions which God assigns to his 
being, but reverently conform himself to them, and 
do and enjoy the good which they allow. Let him 
cast himself freely on the career to which the secret 
persuasion of duty points, without reservation of hap- 
piness or self ; and in the exercise which its diffi- 
culties give to his understanding, its conflicts to 
his will, its humanities to his affections, he shall 
find that united action of his whole and best nature, 
that inward harmony, that moral order, which eman- 
cipates from the anxieties of self, and unconsciously 
yields the divinest repose. The shadows of darkest 
affliction cannot blot out the inner radiance of such 
a mind ; the most tedious years move lightly and 



CHRISTIAN PEACE. 



91 



with briefest step across its history ; for it is con- 
scious of its immortality, and hastening to its heaven. 
And there shall its peace be consummated at length ; 
its griefs transmuted into delicious retrospects ; its 
affections fresh and ready for a new and nobler 
career ; and its praise confessing that this final ' peace 
of God ' doth indeed ' surpass its understanding.' 



VII. 



RELIGION ON FALSE PRETENCES. 
John xv. 16. 

YE HAVE NOT CHOSEN ME, BUT I HAVE CHOSEN YOU. 

One of the greatest difficulties, which Christ en- 
countered in his ministry, was to shake off the ad- 
herents who came to him on false pretences ; and to 
reduce the motives of his disciples to the simple feel- 
ing of faith or fealty, which was the only tie he could 
endure to recognize. Some followed him because they 
4 did eat of the loaves and were filled.' The Sad- 
ducee enjoyed his invective. against the Pharisee, and 
the Pharisee was willing to use his refutation of the 
Sadducee. The kind-hearted rich approved of the 
good he was doing among the poor; the severe 
delighted in his rebukes of the popular corruption; 
the patriotic looked to him as the ornament of his 
country, and the marvel of his age; and only the 
fewest clung to him, because they were 4 of his 
sheep,' and knew and loved his voice. His many- 
sided wisdom turned some phase of excellence or 
wonder towards every spectator; and each in suc- 
cession was worthy, not of less, but of far more, ad- 
miration than it received. Yet he declined the 
attachment of those who did not penetrate to the 
central lines of all his truth and sanctity ; refused to 
be judged by the outward appearance, rather than 



RELIGION ON FALSE PRETENCES. 



93 



the inward principle, of his life ; never suffered him- 
self to be regarded as an object of others' choice, but 
himself selected for his own such as were taken cap- 
tive in soul by the power of so divine a spirit. Those 
who would not vow allegiance to him for his own 
sake, and take up for him the cross which he would 
bear for them, might go their way, and sorrowing feel 
that they were none of his. 

This difficulty, of bringing the heart to a pure 
simplicity of faith, was no accident peculiar to the 
personal ministry of our Lord. Proceeding from 
causes which human nature reproduces in every age, 
it still interrupts the genuine influence of his religion; 
which multitudes hold and profess on false and in- 
sufficient grounds, adducing every variety of excuse 
for sanctioning its authority ; but which few receive, 
as too great to be patronized, and too true to be 
proved. The ingenuity and restlessness of men are 
perpetually dissipating the primitive impressions of 
their reason and conscience, devising elaborate justi- 
fications of that which best justifies itself, and multi- 
plying artificial foundations for that which is natural. 
And the evil is, that when the insecurity of all this 
comes to be detected, and the structure of our own 
erection is found to be crumbling beneath us, it is 
not easy to recover at once the genuine ground of 
nature. The simple perception and deep intuitions 
of the soul become so overlaid by acquired modes of 
thought and judgment, that all faith in them, and 
even all clear consciousness of them, are lost ; and 
thus the original sources of all religious conviction are 
dried up. Some of the spurious forms and second- 
hand imitations of religious principle, always one 
remove from the reality and sincerity of faith, I pro- 
pose briefly to trace. 



94 



RELIGION ON FALSE PRETENCES. 



Religion is frequently degraded, not only by its 
practical supporters, but by its theoretical expound- 
ers, into a mere tool of expediency; and upheld as 
the most approved engine for the production of good 
morals and the maintenance of social order. Sup- 
port is invited to it, on the ground that men are 
unmanageable without it; that, but for its powerful 
hold on the human mind, the elements of repulsion 
would become ascendant in the community, and dis- 
sipate it into a multitude of individual self-wills. It 
is a shameful spectacle, when its own representatives 
condescend to plead for it thus; and go ignominiously 
round, supplicating votes in its behalf, for the vacant 
office of Master of Police ! What sort of obedience 
is likely to be rendered to a creature of our own 
appointment, chosen from prudence, and removable 
at pleasure? Nothing can be more evident than 
that such advocates are thinking only of restraining 
others, and are by no means filled with the idea of 
submission themselves. A heart occupied and soft- 
ened by the spirit of allegiance itself will make a 
quite different appeal; will never dream that any 
suffrage can add authority to the faith that rules it 
rightfully; will perhaps think it somewhat irreligious 
for even the most important persons to offer to the 
Almighty the weight of their great influence; and 
will feel that things divine are so much higher than 
things serviceable, that to recommend them for then- 
use is to deny their essence, and to disown their obli- 
gation. Nay, does not a secret voice assure us all, 
that short of the sacrifice of self-will, and the cheerful 
movement within the limits of a Supreme Law, there 
is not even the faint beginning of religion; and that 
this concern for the common good, this idea of giving 



RELIGION ON FALSE PHETENCES. 



95 



a sanction to the claims of piety, is an evasion of that 
personal surrender, which it is so easy to approve in 
others, so hard to achieve within ourselves? This 
temper feels as if it were outside the great and 
solemn conditions of humanity, and in concern for 
others' exposure to them, lapses into forgetfulness 
itself; as if it had nothing to do with the strife of 
temptation, and the toil of duty, and the cry of grief. 
The complacent patron of religion, — will he not die? 
will he not go, all alone, into the silence of eternity, 
and personally look into the reality of those things 
of which he has always approved of keeping up the 
show? Will he not stand face to face with the God 
whose service he has liberally encouraged ? — empty, 
it is to be feared, of the only offering which he could 
tranquilly present, — the offer of himself; and thrown 
upon the Infinite, not as a child upon a parent's 
bosom, but as a penitent in abasement before the 
Judge? Nor does this seem so distant, that there is 
much time to play at pretences with it in the mean- 
while. As sure as this world is swimming fast 
through space and time, we are all afloat in the same 
life-vessel; and have, moreover, a voyage before us, 
of which even the stoutest heart may well think in 
earnest. 

I do not, of course, mean that religious faith does 
not conduce to the moral order of society; or that 
estimable men may not innocently be aware of this, 
and reckon on it. But I do say, that it is not upon 
this that the obligatory character of religion rests; 
that this social action is not the source, but the effect, 
of its binding authority upon the mind ; and that to 
look first to its benefits, and then to its sanctity, is to 
invert the true order of our moral life, and set the 



96 



HEL1GI0X OX FALSE PEETEXCES. 



pyramid of duty upon its point rather than its base. 
If the great principles of religion were false, if it were 
all a fiction, that we lived under a God and in front 
of a heaven, it is obvious that these beliefs would 
have no claim upon us ; that their relation to our 
conscience would even be reversed ; and that what- 
ever support they might appear to afford to the 
laws of rectitude and peace, our sole duty to them, as 
delusions, would be to expose and expel them ; the 
looser dictates of expediency yielding at once to the 
severer rule of veracity. And it is therefore not in 
their usefulness, but in their truth, that their authority 
resides; it is w T ith that alone that our allegiance to 
them must stand or fall ; to that alone our souls are 
permitted to bow; nay, on that alone that all their 
moral excellence depends. A devout man does his 
duty better than another, because he sees his position 
more completely; gazes over the wide field of his 
relations visible and invisible; exaggerates nothing 
from its proximity, and overlooks nothing from its 
distance ; but with the clear sense of moral proportion 
receives from all the true impression, and gives to all 
the fit affection. He does not render his mental view 
false by ignoring the whole region that lies beyond 
experience, and treating it as if it had no existence ; 
or fever his passions and fret away his peace by im- 
prisoning the whole energies of his nature within 
some narrow object, — a section only of the life 
which they are qualified to fill. It is because his 
mind is right, that his hand does right. 

The same insult, which is committed against reli- 
gion by representing it as the tool of social order, 
is repeated, when it is prescribed as the only means 
? finding any semblance of comfort in circumstances 



RELIGION ON FALSE PRETENCES. 



97 



otherwise desperate. No one can be ignorant that it 
is frequently exhibited in this light; and that men are 
advised to lay by a prudent store of it, as a resource 
of happiness during the dreary winter of distress. 
Nothing can be more true to nature than the fact 
alleged; nothing more false than the exhortation 
founded on it. Certain it is, there is no real con- 
quest of evil, except by the devout mind, that can 
bleed beneath the thorny lot, yet clasp it in closer 
love, like the piercing crucifix of self-mortiflcation 
upon the breast. It is certain that a pure trust, de- 
fying nothing that is sent of God, but bending with 
self-renunciation before his whirlwinds sweeping by, 
feels least resistance of terrible necessity chafing 
against its peace. But in mere cupidity for the com- 
forts of faith there is no religion, but, on the contrary, 
the total privation of all religion ; there is precisely 
that deliberate reservation of self, that fencing of it 
round against the assaults of unhappiness, that mere 
service for hire, in which is the very essence of dis- 
loyalty to heaven. Nor does God ever award the 
least success to these insurance speculations on his 
service ; and only those who give themselves up to 
him without a question find their happiness returned. 
Vain every way are all these attempts to make that 
which is divine subordinate to our personal ends : we 
only bring down the awful rebuke, ' Ye have not 
chosen me, but I have chosen you.' 

Religion, again, is often represented, not exactly as 
the instrument for producing good morals, but as in 
fact the very same with good morals. We hear the 
sentiment constantly repeated, that, after all, the 
service of man is the truest service of God. Now 
if this maxim mean that so long as human good is 
9 



9S 



RELIGION ON FALSE PRETENCES. 



effected, it does not signify on ivhat principles it is 
done, no statement could well be more false. Let us 
only see. Here is a man, who serves the common- 
wealth from ambition, and merits the good w T ill of his 
neighbors, that he may mount by it. He selects 
some conspicuous utility, labors at it visibly enough, 
and defends himself from the aversion of the few by 
surrounding himself with the plaudits of the many; 
and if you look at him, busy before the face of his 
community, you will not fail to see the manner of his 
diligence; that in proportion as they raise the shout, 
he prosecutes the work; that when they are tired, 
he grows idle; and when they can lift their voices 
no higher, and no more can be gained by laboring 
for their good, either he begins to toil in the opposite 
direction, or, throwing down all implements of work, 
gives himself up to strange gambols, at which the 
spectators, who have exhausted all their praise, may 
at least gratify him by being astonished. 

Here is another man, smitten, we will say, with 
honest pity for the degradation and misery of the 
great mass of every civilized society; indignant, it 
may be, (who can help it ?) that all citizens have not 
enough food and enough knowledge ; studious of the 
economic causes which interfere with such a result ; 
but unhappily seeing no further than the mere sen- 
tient and intellectual man, and possibly dreaming 
that their oppression and wretchedness have been 
aggravated, instead of assuaged, by the restraints of 
the moral and the aspirations of <he spiritual nature. 
You see him accordingly, — a benignant, thinking 
animal, — enthusiastically devoted to projects for 
making the life of man comfortable, intelligent, and 
clean ; primarily impressed with the necessity of 



RELIGION ON FALSE PRETENCES. 



99 



increasing the productiveness of the earth ; and 
therefore secondarily, with the importance of im- 
proving man as the producing instrument; trusting 
to a preternatural development of the physical and 
rational faculties, to supply some adequate counter- 
feit of moral order, that may look the same from 
outside the heart ; transferring to personal interest 
the venerated dress and badges of duty, but really 
disowning any law higher than the collective forces 
of self-will ; loosening any particular ties with which 
the feelings of mankind have connected a peculiar 
sacredness ; and suppressing, as an unmeaning weak- 
ness, any sentiment above that of obtuse submission, 
in case of accident, to the operation of crushing and 
fracture by the disordered mechanism of nature. 
And once at least there has been a Christ ; not 
seeking to thrust up human nature from below, but 
to raise it from above ; knowing that its earth could 
produce nothing, except for its pure and spreading 
heaven ; and so, coming down upon it, as an angel 
soul from the highest regions of the spirit ; speaking 
seldom to it of its happiness, constantly of its holi- 
ness ; dwelling little on the arrangements, and much 
on the responsibilities, of life ; pitying its woes, as it 
pities them itself in moments of truest aspiration, 
not with mere nervous sympathy, but with godlike 
and healing mercy ; assuming its place in the midst 
of God, and on the surface of eternity, and from this 
sublime position, as a base, computing its obligations 
and uttering oracles of its destiny. Which now of 
these three, do you think, is truly neighbor to our 
poor nature, wounded and bleeding by the way? 
Which of them has really tended and restored it 
from being half dead? It is impossible to deny to 



100 



RELIGION OX FALSE PEETENCES. 



even the least worthy of them the praise of rendering 
service to man, — but can we say of them all that 
there is a service of God ? Are all felt to be equally 
noble and venerable? Or do we measure our rev- 
erence for them by the scale and service of their 
operation ? Is it not rather the different principle 
which is at the root of each, that determines the sen- 
timent we direct towards them ? 

No one, I believe, sincerely feels that the simply 
humane and prosaic view of life and men, such as a 
naturalist or a statist might take, is as true and high 
a source of benevolent action, as the reverential and 
divine, that commences with the spiritual relations, 
and thence descends to the economy of the outward 
lot. If then the maxim, that the service of men is 
the truest service of God, is adduced to excuse the 
indifference of many an amiable heart to the great 
truths of faith, and to palliate the defects of a merely 
ethical benevolence; if it is the plea of social kind- 
ness to be let alone on the subject of diviner obliga- 
tions, it cannot be admitted. But as self -justification 
is seldom deficient in ingenuity, there is a sense in 
which this aphorism is unquestionably true ; in 
which, indeed, it does but contain the sentiment of 
the apostle ; 1 he that loveth not his brother whom 
he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath 
not seen?' From the love of man we do not neces- 
sarily rise into the love of God ; but from any true 
love of God, we inevitably descend into the love of 
man, — his child, his image, the object of his bene- 
diction, and the sharer of his immortality. Nor is 
this maxim without an important application to our 
moral estimates of others, whose acts alone are ex- 
posed to view, and of whose secret motives and 



RELIGION ON FALSE PRETENCES. 



101 



affections we cannot take cognizance. Wherever 
we see in our fellow-men the outward life which 
might be the possible fruit of religious principle, 
though perhaps explicable as some inferior growth, 
we have certainly no right to deny the existence of 
the nobler root; but must accept their service of man 
as presumption of their fidelity to God. I only 
protest against that self-flattery, which permits our 
good-nature towards earth to lull to sleep our aspira- 
tions to heaven. 

Another spurious form of religion is discerned 
among those who regard it as an indispensable orna- 
ment of character; who speak much of the incom- 
pleteness of human nature without it ; and plead the 
claims of piety on the ground, that it is an offence 
against mental symmetry to be without it. The 
most palpable exhibition of this imitation of faith 
is found among those who, after craniological re- 
search, conceive that they have discovered a certain 
cerebral provision for a god ; and who therefore con- 
clude that the culture of devotion is necessary to 
physiological consistency. They speak at large of 
man's need of a religion, of his unsatisfied wants 
without it ; of the grace which it adds to his moral 
stature, the dignity it gives to his affections, the 
power which it administers to his will; and then 
they issue orders to their ingenuity to devise a 
religion suitable to this discovered want, precisely 
adapted to the cravings of this appetite. Alas! how- 
ever, this is not the way in which a religion can be 
found ; it cannot thus by any skill be carved and 
constructed according to measurements taken on 
purpose from our nature. It is easy indeed to im- 
agine and invent a faith, seemingly just fitted to our 



102 



RELIGION ON FALSE PRETENCES. 



wants ; but then comes the question, How are we to 
get it believed? And here, it is to be feared, is the 
failure of this school; they seem to have more faith 
in the religiousness of man, than in the reality of 
God. The same danger attends the idea, wherever 
found, of aiming constantly at our own self-perfec- 
tion, and, under the influence of this aim, striving to 
put the last and saintly finish of a pure devotion to 
our character. Surely there is something unsound 
and morbid in thus resolving the whole idea of ob- 
ligation and truth into that of beauty. As long as 
we are but painting our own ideal portrait, we can 
produce no living and substantial goodness, but a 
mere canvas thing of surface dimension only. Hu- 
man character and life are something more than 
mere matters of taste and propriety; and will attain 
to nothing excellent till they are regarded in the 
spirit of an earnest reality. Devotion can find no 
firm foundation in the notion of its relative fitness 
to us, but must feel its foot on the absolute truth of 
its glorious and sublime objects. All else is abhor- 
rent from the pure simplicity of faith, and tends only 
to foster an indifference to truth, and an affectation 
of religion. God, refusing to be discerned through 
the impure eye of expediency, reveals himself only to 
our inward intuitions of conscience. The piety that 
loves him will recognize no third thing between yea 
and no. To assume his reality, because the hypoth- 
esis seems to open the best training school for our 
human nature ; to treat the highest of all things as 
true, only because we want it to be true, and shall be 
the better for it if it is, — what is this but, under 
decent disguise, the French philosopher's character- 
istic exclamation, ' If there were not a God, we should 



RELIGION ON FALSE PRETENCES. 



103 



have to invent one.' To an earnest mind this air of 
protection and appropriation towards things divine 
and holy is unspeakably offensive. It is for God 
to rale and guard our conscience, not for our con- 
science to take care of God. And to every pure 
submissive mind his voice within is heard rebuking 
this presumptuous spirit, and repeating the words of 
Christ, 1 Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen 
you.' 



VIII. 



MAMMON-WORSHIP, 

Matthew vi. 28. 

consider the lilies of the field, how they grow \ they toil 
not, neither do they spin; and yet i say unto you, that 
solomon, in all his glory, was not arrayed like one of 

THESE. 

In no time or country has Christianity ever been 
exhibited in its simple integrity. The soul of its 
author was the only pure and perfect expression of 
its spirit ; it was at once the creator and the sole 
director of his mind ; born within that palace to be 
its Lord. In every other instance Christianity has 
been only one out of many influences concerned in 
forming the character of its professors ; and they 
have given it various shapes, according to the cli- 
mate, the society, the occupations in which they have 
lived. The prejudices and passions of every com- 
munity, the inevitable growth of its position, have 
weakened its religion and morality in some points, 
and strengthened them in others. So that all par- 
ticular Christianities are distortions of the great 
original ; like paintings placed in a false light ; or 
rather like those grotesque images seen in the concave 
surfaces of things, which, lengthen or shorten as they 
may, spoil the beauty that depends upon proportion. 
The student will find in his religion the nutriment of 
divinest speculation — the tenets of a sublime phi- 
losophy in which heaven resolves the great problems 
of duty, fate and futurity ; and when his genius soars 



MAMMON-WORSHIP. 



105 



to the highest heaven of invention, he feels that he 
is borne upon his faith, as on eagles' wings. The 
patriot, cast on evil times, without a glimpse of these 
contemplative subtleties, sees in it the law of liberty ; 
hears in it a clear call, as from the trump of God, to 
vindicate the rights of the oppressed ; he delights to 
read how Christ provoked bigots to gnash their teeth 
with rage, and Paul proclaimed that of one blood 
were all nations made. The peasant lays to heart 
its mercy to the pure, and its promise to the good. 
The merchant takes it as the root of uprightness ; 
the artist visits it as the source of moral beauty the 
most divine. The system is edited anew in the mind 
of every class. 

"We live in a country whose national character is 
very marked, and on whose people certain prevailing 
habits and employments are imposed by a peculiar 
soil, a Northern climate, and insular position. Various 
causes, both social and political, are filling England 
more and more with a manufacturing and mercantile 
population. The fact, taken in all its connections, is 
by no means to be deplored ; and in various ways 
comprises in it auguries of vast good. Bat in the 
meanwhile it is attended with this particular result ; 
that the spirit of gain is ascendant over every other 
passion and pursuit by which men can be occupied. 
Neither pleasure, nor art, nor glory, can beguile our 
people from their profits. War was their madness 
once; but the temple of Moloch is deserted, and 
morning and evening the gates of Mammon are 
thronged now. There is the idol from whose seduc- 
tions our Christianity has most to fear. Without 
indulging in any sentimental declamation against 
the pursuit and influence of wealth, we may be per- 



106 



MAMMON-WORSHIP. 



mitted to feel, that this is the quarter from which, 
specifically, our moral and religious sentiments are 
most in danger of being vitiated. The habits which 
produce the danger may be inevitable, forced upon 
us by a hard social necessity ; still in bare self-knowl- 
edge there is self-protection. For, the danger of a 
vice is not like the danger of a pestilence, in which 
the most unconscious are the most safe ; and the 
fear of contagion, which, in the one case, absorbs the 
poison into the veins of the body, repulses in the 
other the temptation from the mind. 

The excess, to which this master-passion is carried, 
perverts our just and natural estimate of happiness. 
It cannot be otherwise, when that which is but a 
means is elevated into the greatest of ends ; when 
that which gives command over some physical com- 
forts becomes the object of intenser desire than all 
blessings intellectual and moral, and we live to get 
rich, instead of getting rich that we may live. The 
mere lapse of years is not life ; to eat and drink and 
sleep ; to be exposed to the darkness and the light ; 
to pace round in the mill of habit, and turn the 
wheel of wealth ; to make reason our book-keeper, 
and turn thought into an implement of trade, — this 
is not life. In all this, but a poor fraction of the 
consciousness of humanity is awakened ; and the 
sanctities still slumber which make it most worth 
while to be. Knowledge, truth, love, beauty, good- 
ness, faith, alone give vitality to the mechanism of 
existence ; the laugh of mirth that vibrates through 
the heart ; the tears that freshen the dry wastes with- 
in; the music that brings childhood back; the prayer 
that calls the future near ; the doubt which makes us 
meditate ; the death which startles us with mystery ; 



MAMMON-WORSHIP. 



107 



the hardship that forces us to straggle; the anxiety 
that ends in trust, — are the true nourishment of our 
natural being. But these things, which penetrates to 
the very core and marrow of existence, the votaries of 
riches are apt to fly; they like not any thing that 
touches the central and immortal consciousness ; they 
harry away from occasions of sympathy into the snug 
retreat of self; escape from life into the pretended 
cares for a livelihood ; and die at length busy as ever 
in preparing the means of living. 

With a large and, I fear, predominant class among 
us, it is scarcely an exaggeration to say, that money 
'measureth all things,' and is more an object of am- 
bition than any of the ends to which it affects to be 
subservient. It is the one standard of value, which 
gives estimation to the vilest things that have it, and 
leaves in contempt the best that are without it. It is 
set up as the measure of knowledge ; for is it not 
notorious that no intellectual attainments receive a 
just appreciation, but those which may be converted 
into gold; that this is the rale by which, almost 
exclusively, parents compute the worth of their chil- 
dren's education, and determine its character and 
extent? It is not enough that the understanding 
burns with generous curiosity for the conquest of 
some new science, or the fancy for some new accom- 
plishment; it is not enough that a study is needed to 
brace the faculties with health, or illumine the im- 
agination with beauty, or agitate the heart with high 
sympathies; 'but what is the use of it?' is the ques- 
tion still asked, — as if it were not use enough, 
instead of a trader to make a man. Research and 
speculation which do not visibly tend to the produc- 
tion of wealth are regarded by all, except the classes 



108 



MAMMON- WORSHIP. 



engaged in their pursuit, as the dignified frivolities of 
whimsical men ; and though they may bear the torch 
into the darkness of antiquity, or open some unex- 
plored domain of nature, they must not expect more 
than a cold tolerance. Still worse; money with us is 
the measure of morality; for those parts and attributes 
of virtue are in primary esteem which are conducive 
to worldly aggrandizement; and it is easy to perceive 
that no others are objects of earnest and hearty am- 
bition. Industry and regularity, and a certain easy 
amount of pecuniary probity, being indispensable 
instruments of prosperity, the great moral forces of 
trade, are in no country held in higher worth ; but 
the amenities which spread a grace over the harsher 
features of life, the clear veracity that knows truth 
and profit to be incommensurable things, and the 
generous affections whose coin is in sympathy as 
well as gold, are the objects of but slight care, and 
slighter culture. The current ideas of human nature 
and character are graduated by the same rule, and 
err on the side, not of generosity, but of prudence. 
The experienced are habitually anxious to give the 
young such an estimate of mankind, as may prove, 
not the most true, but the most profitable, — an 
estimate so depressed into caution as to be altogether 
below justice. To escape one or two possible rogues, 
we must suppose nobody true; for the sake of pe- 
cuniary safety, we must submit to the moral wretch- 
edness of universal distrust, and blacken the great 
human heart for our private ease ; as if it were not 
better to run the risk of ruin, than grow familiar with 
so vast a lie ; happier to be bankrupt in wealth than in 
the humanities. But alas! with us money is the 
measure of all utility; it is this which constitutes the 



MAMMON-WORSHIP. 



109 



real though disguised distinction between the English 
notions of theory and practice. A truth may be in 
the highest degree grand and important, may relieve 
many a cold and heavy doubt, and open many a fair 
and brilliant vision; but unless it has some reference 
to money, it is pronounced a mere theory. A social 
improvement may be suggested, which promises to 
remove some absurd anomaly, to assert some com- 
prehensive principle, or annihilate some sufferings of 
mere feeling ; but becanse it has no direct relation to 
the mechanism of property, it is set aside as not 
practical. By an unnatural abuse of terms, practical 
men do not mean with us, those who study the bear- 
ing of things on human life in its widest comprehen- 
sion, but men who value everything by its effect 
upon the purse. 

In obedience to the same dominant passion, vast 
numbers spend their term of mortal service in restless 
and uneasy competition, in childish struggles for a 
higher place in the roll of opulence or fashion, in 
jealousies that gnaw to the very heart of luxury, in 
ambition that spoils the present splendor by the 
shadow of some new want. Happy they of simpler 
feelings, who have taken counsel of a pure nature 
about the economy of good; who know from what 
slight elements the hand of taste can weave the 
colors into the web of life, and from what familiar 
memories the heart draws the song of cheerfulness as 
the work proceeds ; who find no true pleasure marred 
because it is plebeian, nor any indulgence needful 
because decreed by custom ; who discern how little 
the palace can add to the sincere joy of a loving and 
a Christian home, and feel that nature dwells at the 
centre after all ; who have the firmness to retire to 
10 



110 



MAMMON- WOBSHIP. 



that inner region, and embrace the toils of reason, the 
labors of sympathy, the strife of conscience, the ex- 
haustless ambition of Duty, as Heaven's own way 
to combine the divinest activity with the profoundest 
repose. 

The prevalent occupations of the community in 
w T hich we live have a tendency to pervert our moral 
sentiments and social affections, no less than our 
estimates of happiness. In a society so engrossed 
with the ideas connected with property, so eternally 
dwelling on the distinction of meum and tuum, men 
naturally learn to think and speak of all things in the 
language belonging to this relation; to use it as an 
illustration of matters less familiar to them, and 
apply its imagery and analogies to subjects of a 
totally different character. Over their property the 
authority of law gives them absolute right and con- 
trol; no man may touch it with his finger, or call 
them to account for its disposal. I need not stop to 
acknowledge, what is too plain for any one to doubt, 
that this sanctity of property from invasion is, to any 
society, the very cement of its civilization. Yet there 
is an unquestionable danger of giving this notion of 
irresponsible possession an application beyond its 
proper range ; of permitting the sense of legal right to 
creep insensibly into the domain of moral obligation, 
and spread there the feeling of personal self-will, and 
set up the caprices of inclination for the deliberations 
of duty. Men are exceedingly apt to imagine, that 
nothing can be seriously wrongs which they have a 
right to do; to forget that the license which is al- 
lowed by law, may be sternly prohibited by morality. 
How little concern does any wise and conscientious 
principle appear to have with the expenditure of pri- 



MAMMON- WORSHIP. 



Ill 



vate revenue, especially where that revenue is the 
largest ! How despotically there do mere whim and 
chance suggestion appear to reign ! How wastefully 
are the elements of human enjoyment squandered in 
pernicious luxuries, or dissipated in random experi- 
ments of benevolence, of which a little knowledge 
beforehand might have taught the result just as well 
as the failure afterwards ! And if ever a gentle re- 
monstrance is insinuated, how instantly does the 
vulgar and ignorant feeling leap forth, ' and may I not 
do what I like with my own ? ' No, you may not, 
unless your liking and your duty are in happy ac- 
cordance. Morally you are as much bound to dis- 
tribute your own wealth wisely, as to abstain from 
touching another man's; bound by the very same 
fundamental reasons, which forbid the privation of 
human enjoyment no less than the creation of human 
misery. As large a portion of well-being may be 
sacrificed by an act of wilful extravagance, as by the 
commission of a dishonesty ; and were it of a nature 
to be definable by law, would merit as severe a 
punishment. Shall any thing then deter us from 
saying that such self-indulgence is a thief? 

But the feelings which are entertained towards 
property, — the feelings of absolute and irresponsible 
control, — are very apt to extend to whatever it can 
purchase and procure; and unhappily, to the services of 
those human beings who yield us their labor for hire. 
There is nothing over which a man exercises such 
uncontrolled power as his purse; and (where no prin- 
ciple of justice and benevolence intervenes) but one 
remove from this despotism, are placed his depend- 
ants. In them, the right of every human being, to 
be appreciated according to his moral worth, is for- 



112 



MAMMON-WORSHIP. 



gotten; and the rule by which they are judged is their 
mechanical use to the master, not their excellence in 
themselves. That they are responsible agents (ex- 
cept to their employers), that they have an intelligence 
that may be the receptacle of truth, hearts that may 
shelter gentle sympathies, and a work of duty to 
carry on beneath the eye of God, that their bodies 
are of the same clay and their life constructed of the 
same vicissitudes as ours, — are thoughts that too 
seldom occur to lead us to consult their feelings, to 
allow for their temptations, to respect their conscience 
and improvement, as would become a fraternal and a 
Christian heart. How hardly are they judged ! By 
how much more rigid a rule than that which we 
apply to our friends or to ourselves ! What order, 
what punctuality, what untiring industry, what 
equanimity of temper, what abstinent integrity, is 
imperiously and mercilessly demanded by many a 
master, lax, and lazy, and passionate himself! O! 
with what biting indignation have I seen those most 
wretched of educated beings, the governess in a 
family or the usher in a school, worked to the bone 
without the help of a sympathy, moving in perpetual 
rotation, with no feeling but of the daily whirl, and of 
incessant friction upon all that is most tender in their 
nature ; expected to have all perfections, intellectual 
and moral, and to dispense with the respect which 
is their natural due ; copiously blamed for what is 
wrong, but scantily praised for what is right; paid, 
but never cheered; and when worn threadbare at last, 
put away as one of the cast-off shreds of society, that 
only deforms the house filled with purple and fine 
linen. This is the consequence of that state of things 
in which (to use the words of a Church Dignitary, who 



MAMMON- WORSHIP. 



113 



could find it in his heart to write them without a 
syllable of regret or rebuke) ' poverty is infamous ; ' 
and in which knowledge and virtue weigh nothing 
against gold. Let the children of labor remember, 
that they are of the class which he of Nazareth digni- 
fied; that, peradventure, in his youthful days of 
mechanic toil, he too was looked on by the coarse 
eye of sheer power ; and yet nurtured, amid indignities 
and neglect, the spirit that made him divinely wise. 

The despotic temper which is apt to be engen- 
dered by wealth in one direction, is naturally con- 
nected with servility in the opposite. For the very 
same reason that we regard those who are beneath 
us almost as if they were our property, we must 
regard ourselves almost as if we were the property 
of those above us. There is little, I fear, that is 
intellectual or moral in that sort of independence 
which is the proverbial characteristic of our coun- 
trymen ; it consists either in mere churlishness of 
manner, or in overbearing tyranny to those of equal 
or lower grade. It would be inconsistent not to 
yield that respect to the purse in others, which men 
are fond of claiming for it in themselves ; and ac- 
cordingly it is to be feared that in few civilized 
countries is there so much sycophancy as in this ; 
so many creatures ready to crawl round a heap of 
gold ; so many insignificant shoals gleaming around 
every great ship that rides over the surface of society. 
It is a grievous evil arising hence, that the judgments 
and moral feelings of society lose their clear-sighted- 
ness and power ; that the same rules are not applied 
to the estimate of rich and poor ; that there is a rank 
which almost enjoys immunity from the verdict of 
a just public sentiment, where the most ordinary 
10* 



114 



MAMMON-WORSHIP. 



qualities receive a mischievous adulation, and even 
grave sins are judged lightly or not at all. But it is 
a more grievous ill that the witchery thus strikes 
with a foul blight the true manhood of the children 
of God ; — the manhood, not of limbs or life, but of 
a spirit free and pure ; — of an understanding open 
to all truth, and venerating it too deeply to love it 
except for itself, or barter it for honor or for gold ; of 
a heart enthralled by no conventionalisms, bound by 
no frosts of custom, but the perennial fountain of all 
pure humanities; of a will at the mercy of no tyrant 
without and no passion within ; of a conscience 
erect under all the pressure of circumstances, and 
ruled by no power inferior to the everlasting law of 
Duty ; of affections gentle enough for the humblest 
sorrows of earth, lofty enough for the aspirings of the 
skies. In such manhood, full of devout strength and 
open love, let every one that owns a soul see that he 
stands fast ; in its spirit, at once humane and heav- 
enly, do the work, accept the good, and bear the 
burdens of his life. Its healthful power will reveal 
the sickness of our selfishness ; and recall us from 
the poisonous level of our luxuries and vanities to 
the reviving breath and the mountain heights of God. 
There could be no deliverer more true than he who 
should thus emancipate himself and us. O! blessed 
are they who, for the peace and ornament of life, dare 
to rely, not on the glories which Solomon affected, but 
on those which Jesus loved ; — glories which even 
God may behold with complacency, — nay, in which 
he shines himself ; glories of nature, richer than of 
man's device ; genuine graces, resembling the inimit- 
able beauties of the lilies of the field, painted with the 
hues of heaven, while bending over the soil of earth. 



IX. 



THE KINGDOM OF GOD WITHIN US. 
PAET I. 

Matthew iv. 17. 

from that time jesus began to preach, and to sat, repent ; 
for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. 

By the kingdom of Heaven was meant reforma- 
tion upon earth. Whatever difficulties there may be 
in filling up the precise picture which the phrase 
would call up before the mind of a Jewish audience, 
it was unquestionably the Hebrew formula for the 
expected golden age, and was the popular symbol to 
denote perfected society; the final ascendency of 
truth, justice, and peace ; the expulsion of misery 
and wrong ; the eternal reign of all that is divine 
over the world. This theocratic revolution was 
expected speedily, when the words of the text were 
uttered. On the supposed eve of such a change, 
which would itself bring remedies for every imagin- 
able ill, physical and moral, all earnest efforts at 
social amelioration might appear to be superseded ; 
the nearer the crisis of restoration, the shorter would 
be the triumphs of oppression, and the feebler 
the mischiefs of sin : nay. if corruption ripens for 
judgment, a more vehement outblaze of human 
crime might even be welcomed by some, as likely 



116 THE KINGDOM OF GOD WITHIN VS. 

to hasten the interposition which was to quench and 
to regenerate. The appropriate lesson of the hour 
might be thought to be one of passive watchfulness ; 
to lie in wait for the hoped-for redemption ; to relax 
even the accustomed energies of life and duty, as on 
a world grown old ; and, in the words of one writing 
under the influence of this very expectation, to let 
' him that is unjust, be unjust still; him that is filthy, 
be filthy still ; him that is righteous, be righteous 
still ; him that is holy, be holy still ; for the time is 
at hand.' 

Instead of this, however, the great prophet of the 
hour draws the opposite inference ; and utters the 
exhortation short and sharp, 'Repent!' A life of 
worldly acquiescence, of selfish habit, of unloving 
and barren' ease, will not do, he conceives, for the 
kingdom of Heaven ; which, be it what it may, is 
no system of mechanism for forcing men to be wise 
and good without any trouble, but a social state 
accruing from wisdom and excellence previously 
formed ; not a scene from which souls acquire sanc- 
tity, but one to which they give it. Personal repent- 
ance, the transference of the life from conventional- 
ism to conviction, the kindling of pure and productive 
affections, must precede and usher in the reign of 
God upon the earth ; men must truly venerate the 
Deity within them, and he will not be slow to de- 
scend with his peace on society around them. The 
holy and divine must first be recognized and en- 
shrined in the individual and private heart ; and 
then will follow its wider conquests over humanity. 
There is the home and citadel of its strength, from 
which it sallies forth to win its public triumphs, and 
establish its general rule ; there the centre whence 



THE KINGDOM OF GOD WITHIN US. 



117 



its influence radiates, till it embraces and penetrates 
even the outlying margin of barbarism and sin. 

Christ, then, whose voice is Christianity, addresses 
himself first to the individual conscience ; indulging 
in no dreams of a renovated world without, till he 
has flung his appeal to the man within ; looks there 
for the creative and vital forces, which are to make all 
things new. He speaks to his hearers, not as to pas- 
sive creatures who might look about them for some 
position in which it might befall them to be good, but 
as to beings conscious of internal power to strive and 
win the excellence they love ; to grapple athletically 
with the oppositions of circumsta*nce ; and run the 
appointed race, though with panting breast and 
bleeding feet. Herein, I conceive, did Christ preach 
a gospel wholly at variance with the prevailing 
temper and philosophy of our times. It is their 
tendency not to excite men to what they ought to 
be, but to manage them as they are. The age has 
been prolific (like many of its predecessors) in inven- 
tions and proposed social arrangements, by which we 
may sit still and be made into the right kind of men ; 
which will render duty the smoothest thing on earth, 
by warning all interfering motives off the spot, and 
turn the Christian race into a stroll upon a mossy 
lawn. The trust and boast of our period is not in its 
individual energy and virtue, not in its great and 
good minds, but in its external civilization, in schemes 
of social and political improvement, in things to be 
done for us, rather than by us, in what we are to get, 
more than in what we ought to be. We have had 
systems of education, which were to mould the minds 
of our children into a perfection that would make 
experience blush ; systems of self-culture, to nurse our 



118 THE KINGDOM OF GOD WITHIN US. 



faculties into full maturity ; system? of socialism for 
mending the whole world, and presenting every one 
with a virtuous mind, without the least trouble on 
his part. Even those who escape this enthusiasm of 
system are apt to place an extravagant trust in sets 
of outward circumstances ; and dazzled by the splen- 
did forms which modern civilization assumes, to con- 
ceive of them as powers in themselves, independently 
of the minds that fill and use them. Commerce, me- 
chanical art, and more reasonably, but still with some 
error, the school, and the printing press, are each in turn 
cited as in themselves securing the indefinite progress 
of nations and mankind. It would be absurd to doubt 
that these causes operate with constant and bene- 
ficent power on the mind of a people ; but on this 
very account an exclusive and irrational reliance may 
be placed upon them. It is obvious that two meth- 
ods exist, of aiming at human improvement, — by 
adjusting circumstances without and by addressing 
the affections within ; by creating facilities of position, 
or by developing force of character; by mechanism or 
by mind. The one is institutional and systematic, 
operating on a large scale, reaching individuals cir- 
cuitously and at last; the other is personal and moral, 
the influence of soul on soul, life creating life, be- 
ginning in the regeneration of the individual and 
spreading thence over communities; the one, in short, 
reforming from the circumference to the centre, the 
other from the centre to the circumference. And 
in comparing these, it is not difficult to show the 
superior triumphs of the latter, which was the method 
of Christ and Christianity. Indeed the great pecu- 
liarity of the Christian view of life is to be found in 
its preference of the inward element over the out- 



THE KINGDOM OF GOD WITHIN US. 119 



ward; its reliance upon the least showy and most 
deep buried portions of society for the evangelizing 
of the world; and still more upon the profoundest 
and most faintly whispered sentiments of the soul for 
the regeneration of the individual. It forbids us to 
say ' lo, here ! ' or ' lo, there ! ' and assures us that ' the 
kingdom of God is within ' us. 

In attributing the sanctification and moral growth 
of personal character to an agency from within^ 
Christianity is surely confirmed by experience. Rare- 
ly do these blessed changes originate in any peculi- 
arities of the individual's lot, visibly favorable ; — else 
from a knowledge of his circumstances, we should be 
able to predict the history of his mind. Most often 
they arise, without any marked revolution in his con- 
dition, from secret and untraceable workings of the 
soul, from native forces of the inner man, merely 
taking from external circumstances an excuse for 
breaking into energy, — an excuse which a thousand 
different situations would have supplied as well. 
Feeble minds, in apology for their puny growth or 
premature decay in excellence, complain of the cli- 
mate in which God has planted them ; but where 
there is any vigor of life, the good seed will not wait 
to burst, till it be removed to some sunny slope or 
luxuriant garden of the Lord ; give it but a lodgment 
on the rock and feed it with the melting snow, and it 
will start a forest on the hills, climbing with giant feet, 
fast as the seasons can make steps. Whatever truth 
there may be in the doctrine of circumstances, when 
applied on a large scale to tribes of men, — however 
certain it may be that national character is changed 
by the insensible influences of national condition, — 
the application of the notion by individuals to their 



120 



THE KINGDOM OF GOD WITHIN US. 



own case, is almost always fallacious ; and the very 
fact of their throwing upon their fate the blame of 
their own faithlessness and sin, is a sure symptom 
that they have not the living conscience which would 
turn a better lot into a better life. The souls that 
would really be richer in duty in some new position, 
are precisely those who borrow no excuses from the 
old one ; who even esteem it full of privileges, plen- 
teous in occasions of good, frequent in divine appeals, 
which they chide their graceless and unloving temper 
for not heeding more. Wretched and barren is the 
discontent that quarrels with its tools instead of with 
its skill; and, by criticizing Providence, manages to 
keep up complacency with self. How gentle should 
we be, if we were not provoked ; how pious, if we 
were not busy ; the sick would be patient, only he is 
not in health; the obscure would do great things, only 
he is not conspicuous ! Nay, the infatuation besets us 
more closely still, and tempts us to expect wonders 
from some altered posture of our affairs totally inade- 
quate to their production. What we neglect in sum- 
mer is to be done in winter ; what present interruptions 
persuade us to forego is to be gloriously achieved at 
some coming period of golden leisure, when confu- 
sion is to cease, and life to be set into an order 
unattainable yet. As if time and change, which 
should be our servants, and made to do the bidding 
of our conscience, were to be waited on by our servile 
will; as if the pusillanimous submission, once made, 
could be at once recalled. No ; as the captive of old 
was carried off from the field of battle to the field of 
slavery, the vanquished soul becomes temptation's 
serf, and, after tears and repinings, learns to be cheer- 
ful at the toil of sin. 



THE KINGDOM OF GOD WITHIN US. 121 

Once let a man insult the majesty of duty by 
waiting till its commands shall become easy, and he 
must be disowned as an outlaw from her realm. If 
he calculates on some happy influences that are to 
shape him into something nobler, if he once regards 
his moral nature, not as an authoritative power in- 
vested within its sphere with a divine omnipotence 
that speaks and it is done, but as passive material to 
be worked by the ingenuity of circumstances into 
somewhat that is good, it is all over with him ; the 
ascendency of conscience is gone ; collapse and ruin 
have begun. The mind has fallen into contentment 
with the mere conception, — the feeble and far-off 
imagination of excellence; confounds the look of 
duty, which indeed is a fair vision, with the strife and 
effort, the weary tension of resolve, the doubt, the 
prayers, the tears, which may bring our Christian 
manhood to exhaustion. Pleasant is it to entertain 
the picture of ourselves in some future scene, plan- 
ning wisely, feeling nobly, and executing with the 
holy triumph of the will ; but it is a different thing, 
— not in the green avenues of the future, but in the 
hot dust of the present moment, — not in the dramat- 
ic positions of the fancy, but in the plain prosaic noiv, 
to do the duty that waits and wants us, and put forth 
an instant and reverential hand to the noonday or 
the evening task. It is a vain attempt, — that of the 
Epicurean moralist; to c endure hardness' is the need- 
ful condition of every service, and, above all, for the 
good ' soldier of Christ ; ' and no man can try his 
utmost, with comfort to himself. Without great 
effort was nothing worthy ever achieved ; and he who 
is never conscious of any strong lift within the mind, 
may know that he is a cumberer of the ground. 
11 



122 



THE KINGDOM OF GOD WITHIN L'S 



This weak reliance, then, on outward occasions and 
influences for moral improvement is always ineffec- 
tual. And it is the constant experience of those who 
indulge in it, that to postpone the season is to per- 
petuate the sin. Instead of being lifted easily by the 
mechanism of new and more powerful motives into 
a higher life, the most overwhelming vicissitudes 
sweep over them, and after having beat upon their 
defenceless affections, leave them where they were : 
not invigorated into effort, but simply wasted by 
passive anguish; — just as danger, which may but 
reveal to the strong his strength, will sink the para- 
lytic into death. But where, on the contrary, the 
soul rests, with implicit dependence, not on outward 
opportunities, but on inward convictions, on some 
venerated idea of right, there is the true germ of 
spiritual life, the element of a mighty power. This 
repose upon affectionate conviction is the true Chris- 
tian faith ; and he -that has it, though it be little as a 
grain of mustard-seed, is able to cast the mountain 
into the sea. For its force depends not on the great- 
ness or rarity of the thoughts which compose it ; the 
simplest faith, be it only deep and trustful, the very 
smallest idea of a mission in life assigned by God, 
be it only lovingly and clearly seen, 'lifteth the poor 
out of the dust,' and ; to them that have no might 
increaseth strength/ As of old it banished disease, 
and couched the blind, and soothed the maniac, by 
miracles of power, so does it still heal and bless by 
its miracles of love. Who has not seen the frequent 
transformation it effects in the wayward, frivolous, 
self-indulgent child, when some living point has 
been touched within the heart ; how it seems to 
create wisdom, experience, energy, and serenity at 



THE KINGDOM OF GOD WITHIN ITS. 



123 



a stroke, and teaches her best to administer the 
daily and nightly medicine of an unspeakable affec- 
tion to the sufferings of a sick brother, or the infir- 
mities of an aged parent. It puts a divine fire into 
the dullest soul, and draws in Saul also among the 
prophets ; it turns the peasant into the apostle, and 
the apostle's meanest follower into the martyr. 

I have spoken of the sudden change of mind ef- 
fected by a newly-opened faith. In the primitive 
Christian doctrine such change plainly seems to have 
been recognized as possible. And in spite of all 
that philosophers have written, with some truth but 
not the whole truth, respecting the power of habit, 
and the slow and severe pace of moral improvement 
and recovery, and the impossibility of abrupt con- 
version, I believe there is a profound reality in the 
opposite and popular belief (as indeed there must be 
in all popular beliefs respecting matters of mental 
experience). It is quite true, that instantaneous re- 
generation of the mind is not a phenomenon of the 
commoner sort, especially in the present day ; but it 
is also true, that of all the remarkable moral recove- 
ries that occur, (alas ! too few at best,) almost the 
whole are of this kind. It is quite true, that the 
upward effort of the will, when it exchanges the 
madness of passion for the perceptions of reason, are 
toilsome, and, if successful, tardy; and if all trans- 
formations of conscience were of the deliberate and 
reasonable sort, philosophers could not say too much 
about their infrequency and slowness. But the pro- 
cess springs from a higher and more powerful source; 
the persuasion is conducted by some new and intense 
affection, some fresh and vivid reverence, followed, 
not led, by the conscience and reason. The weeds 



124 



THE KINGDOM OF GOD WITHIX US. 



are not painfully plucked up by the cautious hand 
of tillage reckoning on its fruits, but burnt out by 
the blaze of a divine shame and love. It is quite 
true, that such a change cannot be expected, that to 
calculate on it is inexpressibly perilous ; for the deeper 
movements of the soul shrink back from our compu- 
tations, refuse to be made the tools of our prudence, 
and insist on coming unobserved or coming never; 
and he that reckons on them sends them into banish- 
ment, and only shows that they are and must be 
strangers to his barren heart. It is quite true, that 
self-cure is of all things the most arduous ; but that 
which is impossible to the man within us, may be 
altogether possible to the God. In truth, the denial 
of such changes, under the affectation of great knowl- 
edge of man, shows an incredible ignorance of men. 
Why, the history of every great religious revolution, 
such as the spread of Methodism, is made up of noth- 
ing else ; the instances occurring in such number and 
variety, as to transform the character of whole dis- 
tricts and vast populations, and to put all scepticism 
at utter defiance. And if some more philosophic 
authority is needed for the fact, we may be content 
with the sanction of Lord Bacon, who observed that 
a man reforms his habits either all together or not at 
all. Deterioration of mind is indeed always gradual ; 
recovery usually sudden ; for God, by a mystery of 
mercy, has established this distinction in our secret 
nature, — that while we cannot, by one dark plunge, 
sympathize with guilt far beneath us, but gaze at it 
with recoil till intermediate shades have rendered the 
degradation tolerable, — we are yet capable of sym- 
pathizing with moral excellence and beauty infinitely 
above us ; so that while the debased may shudder 



THE KINGDOM OF GOD WITHIN US. 



125 



and sicken at even the true picture of themselves, 
they can feel the silent majesty of self-denying and 
disinterested duty. With a demon can no man feel 
complacency, though the demon be himself; but God 
can all spirits reverence, though his holiness be an 
infinite deep. And thus the soul, privately uneasy 
at its insincere state, is prepared, when vividly pre- 
sented with some sublime object veiled before, to be 
pierced, as by a flash from Heaven, with an instant 
veneration, sometimes intense enough to fuse the 
fetters of habit, and drop them to the earth whence 
they were forged. The mind is ready, like a liquid 
on the eve of crystallization, to yield up its state on 
the touch of the first sharp point, and dart, over its 
surface and in its depths, into brilliant and beautiful 
forms, and from being turbid and weak as water, to 
become clear as crystal, and solid as the rock. 

Meanwhile, though acknowledging, for the sake of 
truth and the understanding of God's grace, the pos- 
sibility and reality of such changes, we must remem- 
ber that, like all vicissitudes of the affections, they 
neither come at the direct command of our will, nor 
descend on those who watch for external influences 
to produce them. There are those who go about in 
passive waiting for a call from Heaven ; who try this, 
and try that, and say, 'lo, here!' and ' lo, there!' 
And they find that ' the kingdom of God cometh 
not of observation.' Wanting to be holy, for the 
sake of being happy, they shall assuredly be neither; 
unless first the crust of their selfish nature is broken 
by affliction, and bending the head upon the shrine 
of sorrow, they cry with a contrition that forgets to 
be happy, — a cry that, it may be, the Divine Spirit 
will not despise. The kingdom of God is within 
11* 



126 



THE KINGDOM OF GOD WITHIN US. 



us. In the latency of every soul there lurks, among 
the things it loves and venerates, some earnest and 
salient point, whence a divine life may be begun and 
radiate ; some incipient idea of duty, it may be, some 
light mist of disinterested love, appearing vague and 
nebulous, and infinitely distant within the mighty 
void ; a broken fringe of holy light, seen only in the 
spirit's deepest darkness ; and therein may be the 
stirrings of a mystic energy, and the haze may be 
gathered together, and glow within the mind into a 
star, a sun, a piercing eye of God. But wherever 
the Deity dwelleth within us, he will be unfelt and a 
stranger to us, till we abandon ourselves to the duties 
and aspirations which we feel to be his voice ; till 
we renounce ourselves, and unhesitatingly precipitate 
our life on the persuasion of our disinterested affec- 
tions. "While his ' Spirit bloweth where it listeth,' 
yet certain it is that they only who do his will shall 
ever feel his power. 



X. 



THE KINGDOM OF GOD WITHIN US. 
PART II. 

Matthew iv. 17. 

from that time jesus began to preach, and to say, repent ; 
for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. 

That the reformation and improvement of indi- 
vidual character proceeds from within, not from with- 
out; that it usually dates, not from any change in 
the condition and circumstances of life, but from the 
birth of some indigenous idea or affection in the 
mind, is the doctrine which I endeavored to establish 
in the preceding discourse. However natural may 
be our reliance on external influences and marked 
transitions in our lot, as facilities for a change of 
mind, that reliance was shown to be delusive, and 
even to originate in a state of feeling, which itself 
forbids the change. A new and regenerative affec- 
tion, wherever it finds root, springs up (like a king- 
dom of God within us), ' not with observation,' but 
silently and unconsciously ; from suggestions seem- 
ingly slight or even untraceable ; with power often 
sudden and triumphant; in a seat within the soul 
profound and central ; whence a transforming force 
radiates over the whole character to its very form 
and visible expression. 



128 



THE KINGDOM OF GOD WITHIN TJS. 



From the case of an individual man, we will now 
pass to that of multitudes. In societies, the order of 
reformation will be found to be the same ; — from the 
centre to the circumference ; from a solitary point 
deep-buried and unnoticed, first to the circumjacent 
region, and then over the whole surface ; from the 
native force and inspired insight of some individual 
mind, that kindles, first itself, and then, by its irre- 
sistible intensity, a wider and wider sphere of souls ; 
spirit being born of spirit, life of life, thought of 
thought. A higher civilization, by which I under- 
stand neither superior clothes, nor better houses, nor 
richer wines, nor even more destructive gunpowder, 
but a nobler system of ideas and aspirations posses- 
sing a community, must commence, where alone 
ideas and aspirations can have a beginning, in some- 
body's mind. Hence, of all the more remarkable 
social revolutions, the seminal principle, the primitive 
type, may be traced to some one man, whose spirit- 
ual greatness had force enough to convert genera- 
tions and constitute an era in the world's life ; who 
preached with power some mighty repentance or 
transition of sentiment within the hearts of men, and 
thus rendered more near at hand that " kingdom of 
Heaven," for which all men sigh and good men toil. 
Private " repentance," individual moral energy, deep 
personal faith in some great conception of duty or re- 
ligion, are the prerequisites and causes of all social 
amelioration. 

It might appear a waste of breath to make asser- 
tion of so plain a truth as this, were it not for the 
disposition of men to invert this order, to plan new 
systems of society in order to perfect the individual, 
instead of seeking in the individual conscience the 



THE KINGDOM OF GOD WITHIN US. 



129 



germ of a nobler form of society. Every vice and 
grievance, every evil, physical and moral, which 
may afflict any class of a community, is apt to be 
charged exclusively upon faulty institutional arrange- 
ments ; upon laws or the want of laws ; on forms of 
government; on economical necessity; on some ex- 
ternal causes which lift off the weight of responsibil- 
ity from the individual will, and make men passive 
and querulous under wrong, instead of active and 
penitent. Their aspirations are turned without, rather 
than within ; become complaints instead of efforts ; 
and spoil their tempers instead of ennobling their 
energies. They must have the world mended, before 
they can be expected to be better than they are : they 
reverse the solemn exhortation of my text ; and pro- 
pose to make a stir to get the i kingdom of Heaven ' 
established first ; and then repentance and moral 
renovation will follow of course. The machinery of 
human motives being, we are sometimes assured, al- 
together out of order, the manufacture of characters 
is unavoidably far from satisfactory. And not unfre- 
quently a truly surprising amount of faith is mani- 
fested in the skill of certain moral mechanists, who 
promise to rectify the disorder, and form for us only 
the true specimens of men. Self-interest is the one 
force, by which all speculators of this class propose 
to animate their new frame-work of society ; its ap- 
plication being ingeniously distributed so as to main- 
tain an unerring equilibrium, and smoothly execute 
the work of duty. A hard-worked power is this Self- 
interest; by which vulgar minds, in schools of philo- 
sophy or in councils of state, have from an early age 
thought to subdue and manage men; but from which, 
time after time, they have broken loose in startling 



130 



THE KINGDOM OF GOD WITHIN US. 



and remarkable ways. Against this reliance for hu- 
man improvement on institutions and economical 
organization, apart from agencies internal and spirit- 
ual. Providence and history enter a perpetual protest. 
And it behoves all wise men to add their voices too ; 
the more so, because it is the tendency of our times 
rather to criticize society, than to ennoble and sanc- 
tify individuals ; to apply trading analogies to great 
questions of human improvement ; to place as im- 
plicit a faith in the omnipotence of self-interest in 
morals as of steam in the arts ; forgetting that be- 
tween the grossest and the most refined form of this 
principle, there can only be the difference between 
the cannibal and the epicure. Let us not glorify the 
body of civilization, and overlook its soul : and while 
luxuriating in its fruits, neglect the waters at its 
secret root. 

The systematic socialist, who is confident he ' can 
explain the origin of evil,' and no less sure that he 
can remove it by a kind of mental engineering or ex- 
act computation of human wants and desires, is the 
extreme exemplification of this spirit. In order to 
indicate the fallacy of his scheme, it is not necessary 
to travel beyond his own class of illustrations. He 
perpetually calls the arrangements into which he pro- 
poses to fit the world, a ' machine.' In every machine 
there is a power to move, and a resistance to over- 
come ; and in this particular project for curing the 
errors and perfecting the minds of men, it is clear that 
the social organization is relied upon as the poiver, to 
repress the human passions and will, considered as 
resistance. Yet, as organization is nothing in itself, 
but merely a disposition of parts through which force 
may be transmitted from point to point, no effect can 



THE KINGDOM OF GOD WITHIN US. 131 

ensue till it is filled and animated with some energy 
not its own ; nor in this case can the boasted engine 
of improvement be worked but by the very minds it 
is intended to control ; and the power and the resist- 
ance being thus the same, the machine must stand 
still, as certainly as the inventions on which sciolists 
waste their ingenuity, for producing perpetual motion 
and self-revolving wheels. Or, to take an illustration 
from morals rather than from physics, it is the same 
mistake, by which a disorderly mind expects to ac- 
quire faithfulness and punctuality of conscience, from 
a neatly-arranged list of employments, and a well- 
filled scheme for the disposal of the hours. While 
the force of good resolve which produced the list re- 
mains, the self-made law continues to be obeyed, and 
the program looks up with a grave and venerable au- 
thority. But the occasion passes, the tension of the 
heart relaxes, temptations crowd and hurry back ; and 
the slips of conscience recommence, and confusion 
triumphs again, though the paper plans of duty are 
symmetrical as ever ; looking now with vain remon- 
strance at our rebellion, till discarded and trodden 
under foot for reminding us of our departed alle- 
giance. 

It is far from my desire to speak lightly of the im- 
portance of institutional and political change. But 
perhaps, at the present day, the true light in which to 
regard it is, that its function is to check evil, rather 
than create positive good ; to prevent, by timely re- 
moval, an injurious variance between the mind of a 
people and its ways ; and leave room for the unem- 
barrassed operation of all active causes of improve- 
ment that may spread from the centres of private life. 
More than this is usually expected ; the intensity of 



132 



THE KINGDOM OF GOD WITHIN US. 



political passion exaggerates the magnitude of the 
stake ; and hence, measures, or the defeat of mea- 
sures, of social innovation, usually disappoint by the 
smallness of the result ; while the conceptions and 
acts of single minds, piercing the deeps of human 
sympathies, and touching the springs of the human 
will, often start from secrecy and neglect to a power 
transcendent and sublime. While the vastest and 
best-executed schemes of subversion and reconstruc- 
tion are necessarily transient, the creation of deep 
individual faith is the mightiest and most permanent 
of human powers. 

For an example we need only turn to the grandest 
of revolutions, the travels and triumphs of Christi- 
anity itself. We do injustice to the gospel, and gra- 
tuitously lessen the wonder of its spread, when we 
speak of it as a system, deliberately projecting the 
downfall of the existing order of things, and urged 
on mainly by the physical power or intellectual per- 
suasion of miracle. No comprehensive scheme of 
policy, no continuous plan, no study of effect how- 
ever benevolent, can be traced in our Lord's ministry. 
These ingenuities are the necessary resort of our 
feeble minds, which have to adapt themselves with 
nicety to foreign causes, to conciliate events instead 
of commanding them, to accumulate power by making 
each step contribute something to the next. But 
where there is an exuberance of strength, and every 
moment is in itself equal to the demand made upon 
it, the soul may retain its divine freedom, unchained 
by the successive links of preconceived arrangement. 
Art and strategy constitute the wisdom of those 
whose ends must be gained against the wills of oth- 
ers ; but are misplaced in those who act vpon and by 



THE KINGDOM OF GOD WITHIN US. 133 

their loving and consenting mind. There is a wis- 
dom of the understanding, arising from foresight, 
which demands policy ; there is a higher wisdom of 
the soul, derived from insight, w T hich dispenses with 
it. To discern ' that which is before and after ' has 
been pronounced the great human prerogative ; but to 
see clearly that which is within is the divine. And 
this was Christ's ; the source of that majestic power 
by which, as the hierophant and interpreter of the 
godlike in the soul, he uttered everlasting oracles. 
He penetrated through the film to the inner mystery 
and silence of our nature ; and when he spake, an 
instant music, — as of a minster-organ touched by 
spirits at midnight, — thrilled and made a low chant 
within. O when speech is given to a soul holy and 
true as his, Time, and its dome of ages, becomes as 
a mighty whispering gallery, round which the im- 
prisoned utterance runs and reverberates for ever. 
His awful vows in the wilderness, the mournful 
breathings of Olivet, the mellow voice that led the 
hymn at the last Supper, the faint cries of Calvary, 
the solemn assurance that heaven and God dwell in 
us, — do they not ring and vibrate in our hearts unto 
this day ? It was not chiefly the force of external 
miracle on the convictions, not the logical persuasion 
of his mere authority, not even the soundness and 
reasonableness of his doctrine, that gave to his re- 
ligion its penetrative power ; but the mind itself, of 
which his life and discourse were but the symbol and 
expression ; the clearness and beauty with which he 
revealed that portion of the Deity that may dwell in 
man, and by action as well as words, proved the re- 
ality of holiness, cast to the winds the doubts that 
hung as foul mists around all that was divine, and 
12 



134 THE KINGDOM OF GOD WITHIN ITS. 

drew it forth from the world's background of night in 
colors soft as the rainbow, yet intense as the sun. 
Had the soul of Christ been different, in vain would 
all external endowments of verbal truth and physical 
omnipotence have been accumulated on him. It was 
that spirit within, — the impersonation of heavenly 
love and light, — that retained around him by un- 
conscious attraction the little band of simple men, to 
whom it was 'the Father's good pleasure to give' 
this 'kingdom,' — this transcendent dominion over 
the human heart. It was this that imparted to them 
their best inspiration, and made them missionaries 
and martyrs ; that followed them like an unearthly 
vision through life, in persecution and peril giving 
them ' that very hour what they ought to say ; ' in 
temptation and conflict coming as ' an angel to 
strengthen' them; in prison and in bonds, enabling 
them to say, ' but none of these things move us.' 
Here was one of God's great powers abroad among 
men, which it was impossible should die. True, the 
world's heart seemed old and withered; the more 
perhaps would the new element spread, like a tire 
bursting in the heart of a forest dry and dead. Soon, 
in the dark and unvisited recesses of many an an- 
cient city, there lurked a living point of faith ; per- 
ceptible at first only in the altered countenance of 
the Jew, whose lip no longer curled in scorn, and 
whose pride was turned to mercy ; or in the opened 
brow of the slave, from whom abjectness seemed 
chased away ; or in the murmurs of happy prayer, 
that strayed from some wretched cabin into the 
street, mingling there with the traffic, the revelry, the 
curse. This was the faith which was to tread the 
earth with royalty so great ; precisely, be it observed, 



THE KINGDOM OF GOD WITHIN US. 135 

because it thus began its march, conquering each in- 
dividual heart that came nearest to its reach, and 
leaving there a garrison of truth and love, before 
passing on to newer victories. Thus, before the holi- 
ness of Christ, which was and is the supreme energy 
of the gospel, the craft of hierarchies, and the force of 
governments, and the inertia of a massive civilization, 
gave way. And while thousands of state-projects on 
the vastest scale have been conceived, executed and 
forgotten ; while on the field of history the repeated 
tramp of armies has been heard to approach, to pass 
by, to die away ; while the noisy shifting of nations, 
and the shriek of revolutions have gone up from earth 
to heaven, and left silence once more behind, —this 
meek power triumphs over all ; speaking with a per- 
suasion which no vicissitudes of language can render 
obsolete, and throughout the ever-varying abodes of 
humanity singing its sweet songs to our heavy hearts. 

The revival of Christianity from its corruptions 
illustrates the same truth ; that the greatest social 
changes begin in the creation of individual faith. 
I am aware that both the origin and the reformation 
of our religion are sometimes appealed to by scepti- 
cal and subversive minds, as justifying contentment 
with their method of procedure, which consists only 
in destroying something falsely esteemed venerable. 
No doubt, on a first view, both these revolutions 
seem to have overturned a great deal. But on 
nearer inspection this character will be found, to 
have belonged to them as a mere accident, not as 
their essence ; as a symptom of something deeper, 
not as their ultimate spirit. Neither of them was a 
merely negative and disorganizing agency, simply 
annihilating a sacred system of ideas; but each, 



136 THE KINGDOM OP GOD WITHIN US. 

on the contrary, a positive and creative power put- 
ting into the mind, not doubts, but faith ; not emp- 
tying and closing up the shrine of the secret heart, 
but consecrating and opening it afresh for worship. 
As new faiths, however, demand new forms, and a 
living religion cannot find a fitting church in the 
dead body of an old one, temples, rites, and priests, 
that once had greatness, ceased to be, replaced by 
other and sincerer ones. Thus, it is true, these 
revolutions overwhelmed ancient institutions, but 
only by creating new ideas ; their internal spirit 
was organic ; their external effect only subversive* 
The Reformation can never be properly understood, 
so long as it is looked at either in the light of a 
change of doctrines, or a publication of the right 
of the intellect to free inquiry. It was, essentially, 
a substitution of individual faith for sacerdotal reli- 
ance, of personal religion for ecclesiastical obedience. 
The same spirit, in a less healthy form, reappeared, 
to reproduce the same phenomena, when Methodism 
arose, and diffused itself with gradual but triumphant 
power from the earnest souls of the Wesleys. In 
all these instances, the regenerative influence com- 
mences its action with the great mass of the people ; 
for it is an apparent law of Providence, that while 
in society knowledge descends, faiths ascend; while 
science, doubt, opinion, all ideas of the understand- 
ing, gravitate from the few to the many ; affections, 
convictions, truths of the conscience and the heart, 
rise from the many to the few. 

Those who are unused to this mode of conceiv- 
ing of human improvement, as spreading from secret 
centres to a wide circumference, and who are ac- 
customed to the notion of civilization by external 



THE KINGDOM OF GOD WITHIN US. 



137 



agencies, may perhaps adduce the printing-press, as 
an instance of a vast engine of amelioration, mechan- 
ical rather than moral. It is obvious, however, that 
the press, with all its magic, is not a power in itself, 
but a mere instrument : — a tool, whose influence, in 
kind and degree, depends altogether on the spiritual 
forces that wield it; which might be given to the 
savage, without producing the smallest fruits of cul- 
ture ; and to a community of the vicious, without 
producing any culture that is good. It is simply an 
implement for the transmission of mental effort ; and 
it is the thought, not the machinery, that works the 
wonders of which we boast. Its function is, to bring 
into contact such minds as there are ; and, as in 
private intercourse, it depends on the character of 
those minds, whether is circulated the vitality of 
health, or the contagion of disease. It is true, indeed, 
that, in the long run, the highest spirits are always 
the strongest too ; but this is a law of nature, which 
human inventions did not make and cannot alter; 
and the press, giving equal voice to all, leaves the 
proportionate influence of different orders of minds 
precisely where it was ; widening the empire, but not 
redisposing of the victory. And after all, it cannot 
serve as an equivalent to the living, individual action 
of soul on soul. Who will compare a printed Testa- 
ment with the voice and presence of an apostle ? 
the words may be the same, and what is called the 
meaning may be apprehended ; but see how list- 
lessly the poor laborer in his cottage turns over the 
dead page, missing the comment of imploring ges- 
ture, and kindling eye, and earnest tones, which 
doubtless pierced and fired the audience of Paul ! 
To individual faithfulness, then, to the energy of 
12* 



138 THE KINGDOM OF GOD WITHIN US. 

the private conscience, has God committed the real 
history and progress of mankind. In the scenes 
wherein we daily move, from the capacities common 
to us all, do drop the seeds from which, if ever, the 
Paradise of God must grow and blossom upon the 
earth. He that can be true to his best and secret 
nature, that can, by faith and patience, conquer the 
struggling world within, is most likely to send forth 
a blessed power to vanquish the world without. 
Mysteries of influence fall from every earnest voli- 
tion, to return to us, in gladness or in weeping, after 
many days. No insult can we pass upon the divine 
but gentle dignity of duty, no quenching of God's 
spirit can we allow, that will not prepare a curse for 
others as well as for ourselves ; nor any reverence, 
prompt and due, in act as in thought, can we pay 
to the God within, that will not yield abundant 
blessing. See, then, that ye walk circumspectly, not 
as fools, but as wise. 



XI. 



THE CONTENTMENT OF SORROW. 

Isaiah liii. 10. 
yet it pleased the lord to bruise him ; he hath put him 

TO GRIEF. 

From age to age mankind have importunately 
sought for the reasons of sorrow ; and from age to 
age have returned from the quest unsatisfied ; for 
still is the question constantly renewed. How could 
it be otherwise ? As sickness entered house after 
house, and waste made havoc on generation after 
generation, it was inevitable that our terrified hearts, 
ever clinging to that which must be wrenched away, 
and warmed by that which must be stricken by the 
frosts of death in our embrace, should cry, Oh ! why 
these cruel messages of separation, these decrees of 
exile thrown amid groups of friends and kindred ? 
But the angel of destruction makes no reply; silently 
he executes his mission ; only he relents not ; and 
whether he be met by tears and prayers, or by frowns 
and the deplorable affectation of defiance, he does 
his sacred bidding, and passes on. It would seem 
that our passionate curiosity, which continues to 
urge its ' why ? ' is never to be satisfied ; but still to 
hand down its question as the eternal and unan- 
swered cry of the human race. And however im- 
patient some minds may feel at our helpless struggles 



140 



THE CONTENTMENT OF SOKROW. 



with this difficulty, the thoughtful will acquiesce in 
them tranquilly. For they know that it is of such 
unsolved problems, of such mental strife with the 
mysterious, which uses up our knowledge, and lets 
us fall upon our conscious ignorance, that religion 
has its birth ; and that the perpetual renewal of this 
great controversy maintains the soul in that interme- 
diate position between the known and the incompre- 
hensible, the finite and the infinite, which excludes 
as well the dogmatism of certainty as the apathy 
of nescience and chance, and calls up that wonder, 
reverence, and trust, which are the fitting attri- 
butes of our nature. There is a sense in which 
the maxim has a profound truth, that ' ignorance is 
the mother of devotion ; ' — a sense, however, by no 
means justifying the continuance of any ignorance 
which can be removed, or can degrade one human 
being below another ; but tending to reconcile us to 
such as may be rendered inevitable by the limits 
assigned to our faculties. If men knew everything, 
they would venerate nothing. Reverence is not the 
affection with which objects of knowledge, as such, 
are regarded ; and to place any object of thought 
under the eye of religious contemplation, it must be 
stationed above the region of distinct perception, in 
the shadows of that Infinitude which sleeps so 
awfully around the luminous boundaries of our 
knowledge. In this position is the great question 
respecting the amount of evil in human life ; near the 
highest summit of our knowledge, and the deepest 
root of our religion. 

To the demand of the human heart for less suf- 
fering and a more liberal dispensation of happiness, 
no answer, as from God, can be discovered in scrip- 



THE CONTENTMENT OF SORROW. 



141 



ture or in philosophy ; and all attempts to assign Ms 
reasons for the present adjustments of the world, in 
this respect, have, I believe, signally failed. But it is 
otherwise when we attempt an answer as from our- 
selves ; when instead of taking for granted that the 
demand is just, and waiting till it obtains its reply 
from without, we look into the demand itself, and 
ask whether it is wise and right ; whether it comes 
from a condition of the understanding and the heart 
desirable and excellent, or disordered and ignoble. 
Paradox as it may seem, it is, I conceive, still true, 
that the state of mind which urges the question is 
necessarily incapable of understanding the answer. 

At the foundation of all our difficulties and ques- 
tionings respecting the evils of our lot, is a secretly 
cherished notion, that we have a right to a more 
advantageous condition. We imagine ourselves in 
some way ill-treated, and think we might fairly have 
expected a happier life. We speak as beings who 
had formed anticipations more sanguine than have 
been realized. The feeling that asks for more hap- 
piness has evidently a private standard of its own, 
by which it tries the sufficiency of its own enjoy- 
ment ; — an ideal measure which it applies in its 
judgment of the actual providence of God ; and this 
is the rule, by which alone the estimate of that 
Providence is made. Now what is the origin of this 
criterion, to which we submit the decision of the 
solemn question respecting the character of God? 
How do we make up our conceptions of the amount 
of happiness which we may fittingly expect? There 
is but one school in which all our expectations are 
trained, viz. experience; but one source of belief 
respecting the future ; viz. knowledge of the past ; 



142 



THE CONTENTMENT OE SORROW. 



that which actually has been, dictates all our ideas of 
what possibly may be. That image, then, of ade- 
quately happy life which we complain of not real- 
izing, that picture which would perfect our content, 
is a repetition of what we have felt, a miniature of 
our habitual consciousness, painted in the colors of 
positive experience. Our present ideal is God's past 
reality ; nor could we ever have framed even the 
notion of such enjoyment, had not our own lot been 
one of peace. By blessing us, he gives us the power 
to entertain hard thoughts of him ; and we take 
occasion, from his claims upon our gratitude, to 
judge harshly of his government. Had he made us 
miserable (as we now count misery), inured us to 
severities so constant as even to shut out the concep- 
tion of any thing better, we should have been ready 
with a song of thanksgiving for the mercies of a lot 
now raising only murmurs. Impious perversity, that 
thus renders to God evil for good, and, in answer to 
blessing, mutters forth a curse ! 

That the tacit claim which we make upon Provi- 
dence has really its origin in a happy experience, 
is confirmed by a fact often noticed, that habitual 
sufferers are precisely those who least frequently 
doubt the Divine benevolence, and whose faith and 
love rise to the serenest cheerfulness. Possessed by 
no idea of a prescriptive title to be happy, their 
blessings are not benumbed by anticipation, but 
come to them fresh and brilliant as the first day's 
morning and evening light to the dwellers in Para- 
dise. Instead of the dulness of custom, they have 
the power of miracle. With the happy, it is their 
constant peace that seems to come by nature, and to 
be blunted by its commonness, — and their griefs to 



THE CONTENTMENT OF SORROW. 



143 



come from God, sharpened by their sacred origin : — 
with the sufferer, it is his pain that appears to be a 
thing of course, and to require no explanation, while 
his relief is reverently welcomed as a divine interpo- 
sition, and as a breath of Heaven, caresses the heart 
into melodies of praise. When the great Father, in 
his everlasting watch, paces his daily and nightly 
rounds, and through these lower mansions of his 
house gathers in the offered desires of his children, 
where, think you, does he hear • the tones of deepest 
love, and see on the uplifted face the light of most 
heartfelt gratitude ? Not where his gifts are most 
profuse, but where they seem most meagre ; not 
where the suppliant's worship glides forth from the 
cushion of luxury, through lips satiated with plenty, 
and rounded by health ; not within the halls of suc- 
cessful ambition, or even the dwellings of unbroken 
domestic peace ; but where the outcast, flying from 
persecution, kneels in the evening upon the rock 
whereon he sleeps ; at the fresh grave, where, as the 
earth is opened, Heaven in answer opens too ; by the 
pillow of the wasted sufferer, where the sunken eye, 
denied sleep, converses with a silent star, and the 
hollow voice enumerates in low prayer the scanty 
list of comforts, and shortened tale of hopes. Genial, 
almost to a miracle, is the soil of sorrow ; wherein 
the smallest seed of love, timely falling, becometh a 
tree, in whose foliage the birds of blessed song lodge 
and sing unceasingly. And the doubts of God's 
goodness, whence are they ? Rarely from the weary 
and over-burdened, from those broken in the practical 
service of grief and toil ; but from theoretic students 
at ease in their closets of meditation, treated them- 
selves most gently by that ligislation of the universe 
which they criticize with a melancholy so profound. 



144 



THE CONTEJSi TMEKT OE SOREOW. 



There are, indeed, those who discern nothing sanc- 
tifying in sorrow ; who say that they are best when 
they are happiest, — of prompter conscience, of 
nobler faith, of more earnest aspirations ; who seem 
sunk in apathy or stung into irritability by affliction ; 
and who pass through it, finding therein no waters 
of life, but only a scorched desert, — where the earth 
is as sand beneath, and the heavens as molten fire 
above. Those whose sympathies thus dry up and 
wither in grief, as if a hot wind had swept over 
them, are infected with the fever of self. In the 
inner and subterranean chamber of their nature are 
no cool springs of affection, collected from the treas- 
ured dews of heaven, but nether fires glowing out- 
wards to meet the heats that strike inwards from the 
skies. They are given over to the insatiable idea 
of mere happiness in one form or other; and, this 
urigratified, find refreshment in nothing more divine. 
Failing in the passive half of life, they pride them- 
selves on the energy with which, in cheerful days, 
they execute their active duties. But it is clear that 
these are not executed as duties, — as due, that is, to 
the high and holy law by which God rules us with 
pure affection. They have no deep root of love, but 
grow from some shallower sentiment, — the sense of 
propriety, the respect to opinion, the taste for order, 
the suggestions of ambition ; for were there the true 
affectionate heart of reverence, how could it thus 
stipulate in favor of its own self-will, how litigate 
with God for ampler wages ? How refuse his wil- 
ling service, unless the post of command and action 
be given, and grow sullen to be appointed but a 
door-keeper at the gate of his tent of dwelling, on 
the outside of its light and joy ? Certain it is that 



THE CONTENTMENT OF SORROW. 



145 



no one possessed by this temper can be the true 
disciple of the Man of Sorrows, or look with the eye 
of Christ on nature and life. No holy spirit fills and 
consecrates their scenes ; no silken cords of divine 
love weave together the whole tissue, dark or gay, 
of human existence, and make it all as a garment of 
God, more sacred than prophet's mantle. What 
difference did it make to Christ, whether in the 
wilderness he did fierce battle with temptation, or 
sat on the green slope to teach the people, and send 
them home as if God dropped upon their hearts 
amid the shades of evening ; whether he stood over 
the corpse, and looking on the dark eyes, said, ' Let 
there be light,' and the curtains of the shadows of 
death drew up, or saw the spirit of duty approach 
himself in the dress of the grave, and on the mourn- 
ful whisper, ' Come away,' tendered his hand, and 
was meekly led ; whether his walk was over strewn 
flowers, or beneath the cross too heavy to be borne; — 
amid the cries of 'Hosanna,' or the murderous shout? 
The difference was all of pain ; — none was there of 
conscience, of trust, of power, of love. Let there be 
a conscious affiliation with God ; and as he per- 
vadeth all things, a unity is imparted to life, and a 
stability to the mind, which put not happiness in- 
deed, but character and will, above the reach of 
circumstance: a current of pure and strong affections, 
fed by the fount of bliss, pours from hidden and 
sunlit heights, and winds through the open plains 
and dark ravines of life, till its murmurs fall into the 
everlasting deep. 

Thus far our complaints against the evils of our 
lot would appear to indicate a wrong state of mind 
towards God. The disappointment in which they 
13 



146 



THE CONTENTMENT OF SORROW. 



originate is the result of happy experience ; and had 
we never been blessed, we could never be querulous. 
In the natural place of affectionate retrospect, we 
suffer the intrusion of murmurs ; and our quarrel 
with the present is a hostile substitute for gratitude 
towards the past. When the custom of God's 
mercies thus tempts us to forget that they are gratu- 
ities, and hardens us to make bold claims of prescrip- 
tive right ; when we begin to reckon among his gifts 
only the extraordinary and unexpected benefits of 
our lot, and, measuring his goodness by the mere 
overflowings of the cup, become angry when happi- 
ness does not rise to the brim, — it is time for our* 
pampered minds to learn, by discipline of grief, a less 
wayward temper ; the canker of too long a comfort 
is eating out the whole religion of our hearts. We 
are dressing up our life, as if it were the eternal 
palace of a god, instead of the brief halt and hospice 
of the pilgrim ; and there were mercy in the stroke 
that should lay it in ruins, and send our unsheltered 
head into the storm, to seek our rest in a meeker and 
more suppliant spirit. It is no mere superstition that 
leads us sometimes to say, of a prosperity and out- 
ward peace, that it is ' too great to last ; ' not indeed 
that any blessing is too great for God to give, but 
only too great for us to receive. Freely might he 
continue it, but innocently we should scarce enjoy it, 
in perpetuity ; and it is the intuitive perception of 
this, the secret consciousness that the upward gush 
of gratitude is growing feebler, — that the incrusta- 
tions of ease are creeping over the wells of spiritual 
life, — that causes us, amid our comforts, to tremble 
as in a day of wrath, and occasionally sheds over the 
brilliant colors of enjoyment a slight and mysterious 



THE CONTENTMENT OP SORROW. 



147 



tinge, as from the shadow of guilt. It is awful and 
prophetic as the handwriting on the wall ; becoming 
a splendor, as of the heavens, to those who revere it, 
and a blackness, as of doom, to those that neglect it. 
Blessed are they that, turning an eye within, can 
discern and interpret it betimes! 

And if our complaints of trial and suffering result 
from a wrong state of mind in relation to God, they 
no less imply mistake in relation to ourselves and 
erroneous ideas of our own welfare. At least our 
griefs of bereavement (which are the severest of all), 
our expostulations with death, treat as utterly gone 
'treasures, whose best portion is with us still ; even 
proved to be present by the very tears that weep 
their absence. For wherein consists the value of 
parent, child, or friend ? Is it in the use we may 
make of him, or in the love we feel for him ? Is it 
in his form, his voice, his features, or in the dear 
memories and delightful affections which these 
awaken in our minds ? As a foreign land differs 
from our own, not in its soil, but in its recollections ; 
as another house differs from our own, not by its 
materials, but by the spirit of its associated feelings ; 
not as a substance, but as a sign, — so does a friend 
differ from a stranger, not in his person, but in his 
power over our hearts. He is nothing to us, but for 
the impression he leaves upon our souls, to present 
which is the mission whereto God has sent him, and 
the office for which we love him. Of all the ingre- 
dients that enter into that infinitely complex thing, a 
human life, of all the influences that radiate from it, 
and proclaim it there, none surely are so essential as 
the affections it kindles in others ; and if beings 
around entertain of it a blessed and noble concep- 



148 



THE CONTENTMENT OF SORROW. 



tion, are rilled by it with generous aspirations, and 
feel the thought of it to be as a fire from heaven, in 
this is its true and best existence ; in this consists its 
real identity, distinguishing it by strongest marks from 
other minds. And all this death leaves behind, as 
our indestructible possession ; from our mere eyes he 
takes the visible form of the objects of our love, for 
this is only borrowed ; from our souls he cannot take 
the love itself to which that is subservient : for it is 
given us for ever. The very grief that wastes us 
testifies that, in his true worth, the companion, we 
lament as lost, is with us still ; for is it not the idea 
of him that weeps in us, his image that supplies the ■ 
tears ? His best offices he will continue to us yet, if 
we are true to him ; with serenest look, as through 
the windows of the soul, rebuking our disquiet, 
bracing our faith, quickening our conscience, and 
cooling our fever-heats of life. Doubtless the 
thought of him is transmuted from gladness into 
sorrow. But will any true heart say that an affec- 
tion is an evil because it is sad, and wish to shake 
it off the moment it brings pain ? Call it what 
you will, that is not love which itself is anxious 
to grow cold ; the emotions of a faithful soul never 
entertain a suicidal purpose, and plan their own 
extinction ; rather do they reproach their own insen- 
sibility, and passionately pray for a greater vitality. 
Whether then in anxiety or in peace, in joy or in 
regrets, let the spirit of affection stay; and if the 
spirit stay, the objects, though vanished, leave their 
best presence with us still. No; that only is truly 
lost which we have ceased to love. If there be a 
friend whom in our childhood or our youth we vene- 
rated for the wisdom of virtue and beauty of holiness, 



THE CONTENTMENT OE SORROW. 



149 



and whom now we regard with the aversion of cor- 
rupted tastes, or the coldness of callous hearts, he 
indeed is lost ; if there be a companion whose hand 
was once locked in ours with the vows, seemingly so 
firm, of our enthusiastic years, and on whom now 
we look with a mind frozen by the worldliness or 
poisoned by the jealousies and rivalries of life, — 
such a one is surely lost ; but not the departed who 
left our world with benediction, and fell close-locked 
in our embrace ; such a one, though dead, yet speak- 
eth; the others, though living, are silent to our hearts. 
Of the alienated the loss is absolute, an extinction of 
•a part of our nature. But the sainted dead shall 
finish for us the blessed work which they began. 
They tarried with us, and nurtured a human love ; 
they depart from us, and kindle a divine. Cease 
then, our complaining hearts, and wait in patience 
the great gathering of souls ! 



13' 



XII. 



IMMORTALITY. 
2 Cor. i. 9. 

we had the sentence of death in ourselves, that we should 
not trust in ourselves, but in god who raiseth the dead. 

Paul, at his nearest view of death, obtained his 
firmest ' trust in God who raiseth the dead.' Socrates, 
with the cup of poison in his hand, declares it power- 
less ; and taking it as the pledge of temporary parting 
from his weeping friends, goes cheerfully forward to 
explore the future. We, who are in no such ex- 
tremity, but at ease and in command of the strong 
posts of life, are seduced into sceptic misgivings of 
its perpetuity, and are conscious of at least transient 
doubts, whether soul and body do not go out together. 
And so, indeed, it ever is. Amid the so-called goods 
of existence, we most shudder at the view of its 
privations ; while from active contact with its griefs, 
its grandeur appears least doubtful, and, in the bold 
struggle with ills, they prove a phantom and slip 
away. From the sunlight heights of life, the deep 
vales and hollows of its necessities look darkest; 
but to the faithful who'se path lies there, there is 
still light enough to show the way, and to no other 
eyes do the everlasting hills and blue heavens seem 
so brilliant. Our nobler faith is not dashed, as we 
suppose, by the severities, but rather enervated by 



IMMORTALITY. 



151 



the indulgences, of experience ; it is on the bed of 
luxury, not on the rock of nature, that scepticism 
has its birth. Paul, the hardly-entreated apostle, the 
homeless and ever-perilled missionary, — his back 
scarred with stripes, his hands heavy with bonds, 
the outcast of Jewish hate and Pagan scorn, — writes 
as he flies, to ask the voluptuous Corinthians, ' How 
say some among you that there is no resurrection of 
the dead ? ' and to prove in words that immortality 
of which his life was the demonstration in action. 
And while from the centre of comforts many a sad 
fear goes forth, and the warmest lot becomes often 
filled with the chillest doubts, hidden within it like a 
heart of ice that cannot melt, you may find toiling 
misery that trusts the more, the more it is stricken, 
and amid the secret prayers of mourners hear the 
sweetest tones of hope. 

This paradox is far from being inexplicable. All 
true religion is a sense of want; and where want 
goes to sleep upon possession, it becomes bewildered, 
and when occasionally opening its eyes, sees nothing 
with the clearness of reality. Religion implies a 
perception of the infinite and invisible ; and where 
the finite is illuminated too strongly, nothing else 
can be discerned, and all beyond appears, not dim 
twilight shadow, but blank darkness. The full-orbed 
brilliancy of life brings out the colors of the earth, 
and makes it seem as vast and solid as if there were 
nothing else ; in the midnight watch, it is felt only at 
the point beneath our feet, and the sphere of stars in 
which it swims alone is seen. Indeed the suspicion, 
that this life is our all, appears to be simply an 
example, upon a large scale, of a delusion and dispro- 
portion of idea, which we are continually experiencing 



152 



IMMORTALITY. 



in detail and without which perhaps our discerning 
and our practical energies would be ill-harmonized. 
I allude to that exaggeration of the present moment, 
that concentration of anxiety and effort on the present 
object, which makes the point of pending action every 
thing, and for a time kills the reality of all beside. 
Desire, else broken by dispersion, singles out project 
after project in succession, on which to gather all its 
intensity; each in turn becomes the vivid and sole 
point of life ; as the eye applied to the microscope 
may see the centre of the field, without notice of 
the margin of the very object beneath its view. 

This optical exclusiveness of mind, this successive 
insulation of effort, is the needful condition on which 
the will performs its work with gladness; for who 
would not sink and faint upon the dust, if the whole 
task of existence were spread before him at once? 
Let us then, in practice, as the laborers of God, bless 
him for our blindness; but in meditation, as the be- 
lievers of God and explorers of his Providence, not on 
that account deny that there is light. Our delusion, 
operating in detail, is corrected by experience, which 
shifts us ever to a new point of view ; and how often 
do we smile in retrospect at the passionate self-preci- 
pitation, the silent tension or stormy force of desire, 
with which we bent towards some aim, that seem for 
the instant the very goal of life; the eagle-eyed pre- 
cision with which we fell, as on a prey, upon some- 
thing that now seems one of the most trivial creatures 
that stirs the grass. Our eyes once opened thus, we 
say that it 'was a dream.' And most truly; for 
those who are awake always discover that they have 
been dreaming; but those who dream never suspect 
that they shall wake. For the time, the images of 



IMMORTALITY. 



153 



sleep are the intensest of realities ; they are the sleep- 
er's universe ; they agitate him with hope and terror, 
with love and grief, with admiration and transport, as 
genuine as human heart can feel; while they continue 
to flit around him, they shut in and limit his belief, 
and totally exclude the conceptions suitable to the 
world on which he lies. And so is it with the long 
trance of human life ; we are ever dreaming to the 
present, and waking to the past; clearly estimating 
each illusion when it is gone, but too vividly occu- 
pied with new ones to expect any morning summons 
to a correcting world beyond. Not till we are startled 
by that call, and stand outside our existing sphere of 
thought, can we discover how much of phantasm 
there is in life as a whole. But the wise will assured- 
ly distrust their feeling of its exclusive reality ; will 
know that if it were a mere scenic image, a painted 
vacancy, environed by immense and solemn realities, 
this same feeling would have been no less strong ; and 
they will rouse themselves so far as at least to 'dream 
that they dream.' 

The feeling of impossibility which, I believe, haunts 
many persons in adverting to the immortality of the 
soul, the vague apprehension of some insuperable 
obstacle to the realization of any thing so great, 
appears to arise from mere indolence of conception ; 
and vanishes in proportion as the affections are deeply 
moved, and the intuitions of reason are trusted rather 
than the importunities of sense. There is certainly 
nothing in our idea of the mind, as there is in that of 
organization, contradictory of the belief of its perpe- 
tuity ;— nothing which involves the notion of dissolu- 
tion, or of limited duration. All the properties of the 
thinking principle, remembrance, imagination, love, 



154 



IMMORTALITY. 



conscience, volition, are irrespective of time ; are char- 
acterized by nothing seasonal; are incapable of disease, 
fracture, or decay. They have nothing in their nature 
to prescribe their existence for an hour, a century, a 
thousand years, or in any way to bring them to ter- 
mination. Were it the will of the Creator to change 
his arrangements for mankind, and to determine that 
they should henceforth live in this world ten or a 
hundred times as long as they do at present, no one 
would feel that new souls would be required for the 
execution of the design. And in the mere conception 
of unlimited existence there is nothing more amazing 
than in that of unlimited non-existence; there is no 
more mystery in the mind living for ever in the future, 
than in its having been kept out of life through an 
eternity in the past. The former is a negative, the 
latter a positive infinitude. And the real, the authen- 
tic wonder, is the actual fact of the transition having 
been made from the one to the other; and it is far 
more incredible that from not having been, we are, 
than that from actual being, we shall continue to be. 

And if there be no speculative impossibility in the 
immortality of the soul, it cannot be rendered incon- 
ceivable by any physical considerations connected 
with death. We are apt, indeed, to be misled by the 
appearances of the last hour; appearances so appal- 
ling, so humbling, so associated with the memories of 
happy affection and the approach of bleakest solitude, 
that it would be surprising if we did not interpret 
them amiss, and see them falsely through our tears. 
As we turn away from that last agony, we are 
tempted to say in our despair, — there, there, is the 
visible return of all to darkness ; the proof that all is 
gone ; the fall of the lamp into the death-stream. Yet 



IMMORTALITY. 



155 



it is clear that neither the phenomena of death, nor 
any other sensible impression, can afford the least 
substantive evidence that the mind has ceased to be. 
Non-existence is a negation which neither sight can 
see, nor ear can hear; and the fading eye, the motion- 
less lips, the chill hand, establish nothing, and simply 
give us no report. Refusing us the familiar expression 
of the soul within, they leave the great question open, 
to be determined by any positive probabilities which 
may be sought in other directions. In life, we never 
saw or heard the principle of thought and will and 
love, but only its corporeal effects in lineament and 
speech. If the bare absence of these signs were 
sufficient to prove the extinction of the spirit which 
they obey, the spectacle of sleep would justify us in 
pronouncing the mind dead; and if neither slumber 
nor silence have been found to afford reason for the 
denial of simultaneous thought, death affords no better 
ground for the dreary inference. It is to no purpose 
to say that we have not experience of the separa- 
bility of consciousness from bodily life ; for originally 
there was no experience of the separability of con- 
sciousness from bodily waking; and with the same 
reason which would lead us to mourn the extinc- 
tion of a friend's spirit in death, might Adam have 
bewailed the annihilation of Eve in the first sleep 
of Eden. Nay, if we are not to conceive of the 
existence of friend, where there is no physical mani- 
festation, it will follow that till there was a visible 
creation, there was no Infinite Spirit; and that if ever 
the Creator shall cast aside the mantle of his works ; if 
the order, the beauty, the magnificence, of the uni- 
verse, through which he appears to us, and hides his 
essence behind the symbol of his Infinitude, are ever 



156 



IMMORTALITY. 



to have their period and vanish; if ancient prediction 
shall be fulfilled, and the ' heavens pass away with a 
noise, and the elements melt with fervent heat;' that 
hour will be, by the same rule which declares human 
annihilation, not only the end of all things, but the 
death of God. 

Indeed there is that in the very nature of the im- 
material mind, which appears to me to exempt it from 
the operation of all material evidence of its destruc- 
tion. It is impossible to form a steady conception of 
thought, except as originating behind even the inner- 
most bodily structures, and intrinsically different from 
them. However much you refine and attenuate the 
living organism, yet after all, thought is something 
quite unlike the whitest and the thinnest tissue; and 
the most delicate of fibres, woven if you please in 
fairy loom, can never be spun into emotions. Nor 
is it at all easier to imagine ideas and feelings to be 
the results of organization, and to constitute one of 
the physical relations of atoms; and if any one affirms 
that the juxtaposition of a number of particles makes 
a hope, and that an aggregation of curious textures 
forms veneration, he affirms a proposition to which 
I can attach no idea. Agitate and affect these struc- 
tures as you will, pass them through every imaginable 
change, let them vibrate and glow, and take a thou- 
sand hues ; still you can get nothing but motion, and 
temperature, and color ; fit marks and curious signals 
of thought behind themselves, but no more to be con- 
founded with it, than are written characters to be 
mistaken for the genius and knowledge which may 
record themselves in language. The corporeal frame, 
then, is but the mechanism for making thoughts and 
affections apparent, the signal-house with which God 



IMMORTALITY. 



157 



has covered us, the electric telegraph by which quick- 
est intimation flies abroad of the spiritual force with- 
in us. The instrument may be broken, the dial-plate 
effaced; and though the hidden artist can make no 
more signs, he may be rich as ever in the things to be 
signified. Fever may fire the pulses of the body; but 
wisdom and sanctity cannot sicken, be inflamed, and 
die. Neither consumption can waste, nor fracture 
mutilate, nor gunpowder scatter away, thought, and 
fidelity, and love, but only that organization which 
the spirit sequestered therein renders so fair and noble. 
To suppose such a thing would be to invert the order 
of rank, which God has visibly established among the 
forces of our world, and to give a downright ascen- 
dency to the brute energies of matter above the vitality 
of the mind, which, up to that point, discovers, sub- 
dues, and rules them ; to proclaim the triumph of the 
sword, the casualty, the pestilence, over virtue, truth, 
and faith ; to set the cross above the crucified ; to sur- 
render the holy things of this world to corruption, and 
shroud its heaven with darkness, and turn its moon 
into blood. Think only of this earth as it floats 
beneath the eye of God,- — a speck in the blue infinite, 
— a precious life-balloon freighted with the family of 
spirits he has willed to come up and travel in this 
portion of his universe. Remember that at this very 
moment, and at each tick of the clock, some fifty 
souls have departed hence, gone with their tempestu- 
ous passions, their strife, their truth, their hopes, into 
space and silence ; not either with the appearance of 
forces spent and finished ; for there are children fallen 
away, with expectant look on life, nothing doubting 
the secure embrace that seem to fold them round; 
there is youth, raised up to self-subsistence, not with- 
14 



158 



1MM0STALITY. 



out difficulty and sorrow, with the clear deep light of 
thought and wonder shining from within, quenched in 
sudden night ; there is many an heroic life, built on 
no delusion of sense and selfishness, but firm on the 
adamant of faith, and defying the seductions of false- 
hood and the threats of fear, — sunk from us abso- 
lutely away, and giving no answer to our recalling 
entreaties and our tears. And will you tell me that 
all this treasure, which is nothing less than infinite, is 
cancelled and puffed away, like a worthless bubble, 
into emptiness ? Does God stand ahead of this 
mighty car of being as it traverses the skies, only to 
throw out the boundless wealth of lives it bears, and 
plunge them headlong into the abyss midway on 
their voyage through eternity? Put the question in 
conjunction with any overwhelming calamity, which 
perceptibly plunges into sudden silence a multitude 
of souls; like the dreadful destruction, just announced 
from the western world, of a ship* freighted with 
priceless lives, with the wealth of homes, the hopes of 
the oppressed, the lights of nations. Let any one 
think over the contents of that fated ship, when it 
quitted the port at even, amid the cheerful parting of 
friends, and consider well where they were when the 
morning broke. There were travellers from foreign 
lands, ready with pleased heart to tell at home the 
thousand marvels they had gathered on their way. 
There was a family of mourners, taking to their 
household graves their unburied dead. And there 
was one at least of rare truth and wisdom, of de- 

* The steamboat Lexington, which left New York for Boston, 13th 
January, 1840, and was burned that night in Long Island Sound, with 
the loss of all on board except four. Dr. Follen was among the number 
that perished. The present discourse was suggested by that event. 



IMMORTALITY. 



159 



signs than which philanthropy knows nothing greater; 
of faith that all must venerate, and love that all must 
trust; of persuasive lips, from which a thoughtful 
genius and the simplest heart poured forth the true 
music of humanity. And does any one believe that 
this freight of transcendent worth, — all this sorrow, 
and thought, and hope, and moral greatness, and pure 
affection, — were burnt, and went out with flame and 
cotton-smoke ? Sooner would I believe that the fire 
consumed the less everlasting stars ! Such a galaxy 
of spiritual light and order and beauty is spread 
above the elements and their power, and neither heat 
can scorch it nor cold water drown. The bleak wind, 
that swept in the morning over the black and heav- 
ing wreck, would moan in the ear of sympathy with 
the wail of a thousand survivors; but to the ear of 
wisdom and of faith, would sound as the returning 
whisper and requiem of hope. 

There appears to be a caprice in the dispensation 
of death, quite at variance with the scrupulous regu- 
larity and economy of nature in less momentous 
affairs; and strongly indicative of a hidden sequel. 
The inferior departments of creation are marked by a 
frugality and seasonal order, that seems to gather up 
the very fragments of good, that nothing be lost. 
Scarcely does a moment elapse before the cast-off 
structure of plant or animal is put in requisition for. 
some new purpose. Such value seems to be attached 
to the tree, that its seed is encased and protected with 
the nicest care, can retain its principle of vitality for 
thousands of years, and hold itself ready to germinate 
whenever the suitable conditions shall be presented. 
The wild animals have a certain term of life allotted 
to each species, which probably few individuals much' 



160 



IMMORTALITY. 



exceed or fail to reach. Everything else seems to 
have its well-defined circuit and range of functions, 
its season of maturity and period of fall. But when 
we rise into the only community dignified by minds, 
all is in comparison confusion and seeming chance. 
Infancy and age, strength and imbecility, the pure 
and the corrupt of heart, the full and empty souled, 
drop indiscriminately away, as if the spirits of men 
were the cruel sport of some high and invisible 
demon-game, — kindled and extinguished in remorse- 
less and capricious jest. And if such a supposition 
is excluded by the harmony and exactitude which 
prevail in the other regions of the creation, nothing is 
left but to believe that we see here only the partial 
operation of a higher law ; that we witness no extinc- 
tion, but simply migrations of the mind; which sur- 
vives to fulfil its high offices elsewhere, and find 
perhaps in seeming death its true nativity. 

Then, too, let us consider in what light we should 
see the character of God, if the fall of the body is 
really the fall of the soul ; remembering that he has 
put into the hearts of most men, by intuition or 
Providential suggestion, a divine hope of something 
future. Turn once more to the thought of that 
burning ship, and think of the memorial sounds 
that went up thence in the night to God. When 
the stars came out the first shriek ascended ; two 
hours past midnight the last was drowned. And in 
the interval did a hundred and seventy mortals 
shiver and cry to him from frost and flame, with 
faith and prayers of various and unspeakable con- 
tents, — the cold heavens looking serenely down, and 
gliding on as if they inclosed nothing but peace. 
And what was the answer of the hearer of prayer to 



IMMORTALITY. 



161 



that agony of despair ? Did he say, as no man or 
angel would have done, i Down, begone for ever into 
darkness ! ' And did he so answer, with the full 
knowledge of his Omniscience, that many a survi- 
vor would return this awful frown with the sweetest 
and most unconscious smile of resignation, hiding 
her mourning head with him, as in the bosom of a 
Father ? Or put yourselves back into the presence 
of an earlier and sublimer tragedy ; remember the 
scene on Calvary, with the words of assured hope 
and meek supplication that passed there from holiest 
lips to God. When his own Christ gave the tran- 
quil assurance, ' This day shalt thou be with me in 
Paradise,' did He, who inspired that promise, and 
alone could fulfil, overhear it with secret rejection 
and denial? When the fainting utterance exclaimed 
with most loving meaning, c It is finished,' did the 
ever-present Father put on that cry a dreadful in- 
terpretation, and £ make an end ' of all things to him, 
— that Son of God ? And when he breathed forth 
those last words, ' Father, into thy hands I commit my 
spirit,' did the All-merciful refuse the trust, and reply 
to that pure faith, ' Take away thy cry, for mine eye 
shall not spare, neither will I hear with mine ear ? ' 
Did he do thus to the Galilean, knowing that, night 
and morning, friends and followers and disciples for 
ages, would converse with him about this departed 
one, with a trustful hope, which he had thus turned 
into a lie ? Were this possible, God were no £ Father 
of spirits,' to waste and mock them thus ; and might 
no less fitly be termed the destroyer than the 
Creator ; and every good man might feel an infi- 
nite pity for his kind, diviner far than the very Prov- 
idence of Heaven. 

14* 



162 



IMMORTALITY. 



Thus, if the celestial hope be a delusion, we 
plainly see who are the mistaken. Not the mean 
and grovelling souls, who never reached to so great 
a thought ; not the drowsy and easy natures, who 
are content with the sleep of sense through life, and 
the sleep of darkness ever after ; not the selfish and 
pinched of conscience, of small thought and smaller 
love ; — no, these in such case are right, and the uni- 
verse is on their miserable scale. The deceived are 
the great and holy, whom all men, aye these very 
insignificants themselves, revere ; the men who have 
lived for something better than their happiness, and 
spent themselves in the race, or fallen at the altar, of 
human good ; — Paul, with his mighty and conquer- 
ing courage ; yes, Christ himself, who vainly sobbed 
his spirit to rest on his Father's imaginary love, and 
without result commended his soul to the Being 
whom he fancied himself to reveal. The self-sacri- 
fice of Calvary was but a tragic and barren mis- 
take ; for Heaven disowns the godlike prophet of 
Nazareth, and takes part with those who scoffed at 
him and would have him die ; and is insensible to the 
divine fitness when even men have felt, when they 
either recorded the supposed fact, or invented the 
beautiful fiction, of Christ's ascension. Whom are 
we to revere, and what can we believe, if the inspi- 
rations of the highest of created natures are but 
cunningly devised fables ? 

But it is not so ; and no one, who has found true 
guidance of heart from these noblest sons of Heaven, 
will fear to stake his futurity, and the immortal life of 
his departed friends, on their vaticinations. These, 
of all things granted to our ignorance, are assuredly 
most like the hidden realities of God ; which may be 



IMMORTALITY. 



163 



greater, but will not be less, than prophets and seers 
have foretold, and even our own souls, when gifted 
with highest and clearest vision, discern as truths not 
doubtful or far off. In this hope let us trust, and be 
true to the toils of life which it ennobles and cheers. 
Whoever 'fights the good fight' shall surely 'keep 
the faith ; ' for God reveals the secret of his future 
will to those who worthily do it in the present. 
This is our proper care. Putting ourselves into his 
hands, and living in submissive harmony with his 
everlasting laws, let us 'finish our course ; ' and leave 
it to him to take us, when he will, where our fore- 
runners are, and the unfoldings of his ways are seen 
with open eye. 



XIII. 



THE COMMUNION OF SAINTS. 

Ephesians ii. 19. 
fellow-citizens with the saints, and op the household of god. 

Society becomes possible only through religion. 
Men might be gregarious without it, but not social. 
Instinct, which unites them in detail, prevents their 
wider combination. Intellect gives light to show 
the elements of union, but no heat to give them 
crystalline form. Self-will is prevailingly a repulsive 
power, and often disintegrates the most solid of 
human masses. Even the Moral Sentiment, so far 
as it recognizes man as supreme, and simply tries to 
make a prudent adjustment of his vehement forces, 
can produce among a multitude only an unstable 
equilibrium, liable every moment to be subverted by 
the ever-shifting gravitation of the passions. Some 
sense of a Divine Presence, some consciousness of a 
higher Law, some pressure of a solemn Necessity, 
will be found to have preceded the organization of 
every human community, and to have gone out and 
perished before its death. There is great signifi- 
cance in the tradition which, in every people of ap- 
parently aboriginal civilization, attributes an inspired 
character to their first Lawgiver, and pronounces 
their subjection to moral order a task which only the 
force of Heaven could achieve. They only whose 



THE COMMUNION OF SAINTS. 



165 



voice could reach the sleeping tones of worship in the 
hearts of men, and awaken some deep faith and al- 
legiance, could so deal with their wild nature, as to 
chain the savage passions, and set free the nobler 
will. And although, in old societies, the innumer- 
able fibres of government, of usage, of established 
ideas, supply a thousand secondary bonds, which 
seem to make the mighty growth secure as the forest 
oak, yet all this system of roots has, I believe, its 
secret nutriment from the devout elements of a na- 
tion's mind ; and if these should dry up in any Arctic 
chill of doubt, or be poisoned by any Epicurean rot 
of indulgence, it would silently decay within the soil, 
and leave the fairest tree of history, first with a sick- 
ening foliage, and soon with a perished life. The 
most compact and gigantic machinery of society, — 
as experience shows, — falls to pieces, wherever reli- 
gious and moral scepticism, by paralyzing faith and 
heroism and hope, has cut off the supply of spiritual 
power. Rome, at the commencement of our era, had 
reached the utmost point of material force and vis- 
ible magnificence ; her organization held with an iron 
grasp the continents of Europe and the East ; her 
military chain spread with unbroken links from 
Lebanon to Gaul, and from the Caspian to the 
iEthiopic Nile ; her wealth and arts had called into 
being ten thousand cities, — no mean imitations of 
her own greatness ; her institutions had diffused a 
universal repose, and the energy of government was 
exercised with a rapidity and precision never sur- 
passed. What brought a power thus mighty, — a 
power that called itself ' eternal,' — to its dissolution ? 
Shall we be content with a figure of speech, and 
say that it broke asunder from its excessive mass ? 



166 



THE COMMUNION OP SAINTS. 



Apart from spiritual decline and causes of moral dis- 
union, I know nothing to prevent a uniform civiliza- 
tion from reaching the most enormous bulk. Shall we 
refer rather to external dangers ; and calling to mind 
the tempest of barbarians that 'roared around the 
gates of the empire,' say that it perished like a Mam- 
moth, in a drift of Northern snows ? Yet with far 
less imposing resources, she had stood up and lived 
through fiercer storms. No ; the stroke was not of 
war, but of paralysis. The heart of religion had 
ceased to beat ; the high faith, the stern disinterested- 
ness, the sacred honor of the republic, had faded into 
tradition ; the sanctities of life were disbelieved even 
in the nursery ; no binding sentiment restrained the 
greediness of appetite and the licentiousness of self- 
will ; the very passions, with whose submission alone 
society can begin, broke loose again, — attended by 
a brood of artificial and parasitic vices that spread 
the dissolute confusion. Yet it was not that the 
conditions of social union had become impossible. 
For observe ; in the midst of this corruption, in the 
invisible recesses of profligate cities, a small point of 
fresh young life is already to be discerned, like the 
bud of some fair growth thrusting up its head among 
the putrefying leaves. A few poor slaves and out- 
cast Hebrews have heard the divinest whisper borne 
to them from Palestine ; have discovered by it that 
inner region of love and hope and trust, in which all 
fraternity of heart begins ; and are banded together 
with a spirit that soon speaks out and prophecies in 
martyrdom. "While Rome displayed its greatness 
even in death, and struggled with the convulsions of 
a giant, the infant faith remained unharmed ; healing, 
as it could, the wounds which the mad world suf- 



THE COMMUNION OP SAINTS. 



167 



fered ; and like a fair immortal child, winning a 
blessed way by entrancing the souls of men with 
the forgotten vision of a divine simplicity and truth. 
Christianity has ever since been the bond of Euro- 
pean civilization ; and should its spirit ever perish 
hence, this glorious family of nations will be dis- 
solved. 

Let us look, with more detail, into some of the 
natural groups which a genuine faith can form ; and 
we shall find nothing incredible in its strong com- 
bining power. 

Worship exhibits its uniting principle in the sim- 
plest form, in the sympathies it diffuses among the 
members of the same religious assembly. 

It is universally felt that devotion must sometimes 
quit the solitude of the cell, forget its mere individual 
wants, and speak as from humanity's great heart to 
God. The scruples of the few who have objected to 
social piety have met with no response; they are 
justly regarded as the eccentricities of a stiff' and 
petty rationalism, that will not stir without a literal 
precept, and trusts any logical finger-post (possibly 
set the wrong way by the humor of some sophistry), 
rather than the cardinal guidance of those high affec- 
tions which are in truth the imperishable lights of 
heaven. To this house we come, my friends, drawn, 
not by arbitrary command which we fear to disobey ; 
not by self-interest, temporal or spiritual, which we 
deem it prudent to consult ; not, I trust, from the 
dead conventionalism that brings the body and 
leaves the soul ; but by a common quest of some 
holy spirit to penetrate and purify our life ; by a 
common desire to quit its hot and level dust, and 
from its upland slopes of contemplation inhale the 



168 



THE COMMUNION OF SAINTS, 



serenity of God; by the secret sadness of sin, that 
can delay its confessions and bear its earthliness no 
more ; by the deep though dim consciousness, that 
the passing weeks do not leave us where they find 
us, but plant us within nearer distance, and give us 
a more intimate view, of that fathomless eternity, 
wherein so many dear and mortal things have drop- 
ped from our imploring eyes. It is no wonder that 
in meditations solemn as these we love and seek 
each other's sympathy. It is easy, no doubt, to 
journey alone in the broad sunshine and on the 
beaten highways of our lot ; but over the midnight 
plain, and beneath the still immensity of darkness, 
the traveller seeks some fellowship for his wander- 
ings. And what is religion, but the midnight hemis- 
phere of life, whose vault is filled with the silence of 
God, and whose everlasting stars, if giving no clear 
light, yet fill the soul with dreams of immeasurable 
glory ? It will be an awful thing to each of us to be 
alone, when he takes the passage from the mortal to 
the immortal, and is borne along, — with unknown 
time for expectant thought, — through the space that 
severs earth from heaven ; and till then, at least, we 
will not part, but speak with the common voice of 
supplicating trust of that which awaits us all. 

There is, however, no necessary fellowship, as of 
saints, in the mere assembling of ourselves together ; 
but only in the true and simple spirit of worship. 
All these occasions of devotion assume that we have 
already some affections to express ; that we have dis- 
cernment of the divine relations of our existence ; 
that we have souls seeking to cry out in prayer, and 
waiting to lie down before God in tears. The ser- 
vices of this place are quite mistaken by those who 



THE COMMUNION OP SAINTS. 169 

look on them as the means of obtaining a religion 
non-existent yet; who see in them only the instru- 
ments of self-discipline ; who perform here no per- 
sonal act of the mind, but passively wait such 
operation as may befall them ; or who assume in 
their mental offerings, not the desires and emotions 
which they really experience, but those instead which 
they only ought to feel, and hope to realize at last by 
persevering false profession. The lips are to follow 
the heart, and cannot lead it; and we are here, not 
to make use of God for the sake of our devotion, but 
to pour forth devotion for the sake of God. Were 
every one in a Christian assembly to be all the while 
intent on his own improvement, to be subordinating 
everything to his own case, and with morbid scrupu- 
losity to be prescribing throughout for his own tem- 
per, there would be simply no proper worship at all; 
there would be not the least union of hearts ; each 
would sit insulated with his own separate self, and 
would be more naturally placed in a solitary cell, 
than amid an unsocial multitude ; there would be 
none of that sublime ascent of soul, that common 
flight of love, in which all individuality is lost, all 
personal regards absorbed, and the vision of Heaven 
and God melts the many minds and many voices of 
the Church in one. O how, within that Presence 
whose intimacy enfolds us here, can we ever stay 
outside the spirit of worship, and perform mere con- 
scientious gestures of the mind, and act a part even 
with ourselves alone as its spectator? Will nothing 
short of the death-plunge into eternity steep us in its 
mystery, and strip off the spirit-wrappings that 
cover us from the communion of God ? We stand 
here, as in Heaven's last resort for penetrating to 
15 



170 



THE COMMUNION OF SAINTS. 



the earnest centre of our nature ; and if the foun- 
tain of the secret life is still encased and does not 
flow, no common shock can break the icy crust that 
binds it. 

Think only, in simplest and briefest review, of the 
considerations that pass before us at our meeting 
here. At this hour of prayer, when we stand within 
the reality of God, and face to face behold his awful- 
ness, and tell how we are glad at all his graciousness ; 
when we hear the sweet voice of Christ, — mellowed 
and deepened as it floats over eighteen centuries of 
meaning, — saying to us, as we bend beneath the 
weight of life, 6 Come unto me, ye heavy-laden ; ' 
when we own the shameful conquests of temptation, 
and repent of the abandoned strife, and rebuild the 
fallen purpose ; when there is set before us the divine 
dignity of existence, and the majesty of our free-will, 
and the high trust of duty, and the tranquil power of 
faith ; when we speak together of our dead, and 
memory beholds their solemn forms so silent in the 
shadows of the past; when we remember how, even 
while we think it, some souls are surely passing away, 
and soon we too shall lay the burthen down and go ; 
when, as from the brink of being, we look into futu- 
rity, and the true voice of judgment falls upon the 
ear, startling as the trump of conscience or healing 
as the symphonies of the blest; when all periods of 
life assemble before the Everlasting that hath no 
age, and the light look of the child, and the steady 
features of manhood, and the shaken head of age, 
denote their several wants and prayers ; when the 
tempted comes to seek new strength, and the mourn- 
er sees his sorrows from a higher point, and the 
anxious is beguiled into a loving reliance, and the 



THE COMMUNION OF SAINTS 



171 



contrite weeps his sin and distrusts his tears; — at 
such an hour, if the disguises fall not from our hearts, 
and leave us a disembodied fraternity of souls send- 
ing the chorus of common want to Heaven, then 
indeed are we slaves to the earthly life, without that 
enfranchisement of spirit, that makes possible a 1 fel- 
lowship of saints,' and exalts us to ' the household 
of God.' 

Where, however, a pure devotion really exists, the 
fellowship it produces spreads far beyond the sepa- 
rate circle of each Christian assembly. A single 
company of pious men, gathered together from 
among a race that could not worship, would indeed 
draw close their mutual sympathies at the expense 
of alienation from their kind. But it is not so. We 
are brought to stand side by side within this place 
by no exclusive propensity, no whimsical peculiarity 
of the few. The impulse is of nature, not of fancy ; 
and we know this at the moment we obey it. We 
meet with the remembrance that we are in the midst 
of brethren who meet too ; and every religious so- 
ciety, though physically shut in by its sanctuary 
walls, kneels in secret consciousness of the presence 
of kindred fraternities without number, subdued by 
the same sanctities, and pressing to the same end, 
not by human agreement, but a divine consent. As 
every individual in a place of prayer, overhearing the 
like spontaneous tones from many souls around him, 
cannot but deepen the fervor of his own ; so each 
assembly, feeling that its neighborhood is studded 
over with similar groups prostrate in adoration like 
itself, sends to Heaven a more genial and humaner 
cry ; and every neighborhood, mustering to prayer, 
thinks of the busy peals from clustered churches that 



172 THE COMMUNION OF SAINTS. 

cross and crowd one another in each distant town, 
or the single quiet chime in every village of the land, 
and finds in the thought a gladder and a kindlier 
praise ; and every land, aware that it is but one of a 
company of nations, federally bound of God by 
irrepressible aspirings to himself, chants its mighty 
note with deeper meaning, as part of a universal 
symphony heard in its unity in Heaven alone. 

Surely it is a glorious thing to call up, while we 
worship here, the wide image of Christendom this 
day. Turn your thoughts away from the noisy dis- 
cord of sects ; believe nothing of their mutual slan- 
ders ; forgive the occasional weakness of superstition ; 
and be not angry with the narrow vision of earnest 
conviction, that can see nothing but its own truth ; 
and far beneath the superficial divisions created by 
the intellect, see in the sabbath spectacle of the world, 
evidence of a deep and wide-spread union of hearts. 
Could we be lifted up above this sphere, and look 
down as it rolls beneath this day's sun, and catch its 
murmurs as they rise, should we not behold land 
after land turned into a Christian shrine ? The dawn, 
that summons mortals from their sleep, bears them 
to-day a new and sacred message ; the sunbeam 
touches the gates of ten thousand temples, and they 
burst open to receive the record of countless aspira- 
tions ; the morning shoots across the desert atmos- 
phere of a weary world, strikes on the stony form of 
giant humanity, and brings out tones of celestial 
music. In how many tongues, by what various 
voices, with what measureless intensity of love, is 
the name of Christ breathed forth to-day! "What 
cries of penitence, what accents of trust, what plaints 
of earnest desire, pass away to Gcd ! What an awful 



THE COMMUNION OF SAINTS. 



173 



array of faces that gaze forth into immortality with 
various looks of terror or of love ! The vows and 
prayers whose millions crowd the gates of mercy no 
recording angel could tell, but only the infinite mem- 
ory of God. Of how glorious a Church, then, are 
we members when we kneel within this place! in 
how solemn an act do we take our part ! with how 
sublime a brotherhood do we own our fellowship! 

But our worship here brings us into yet nobler 
connections. It unites us by a chain of closest sym- 
pathy with past generations. In our helps to faith 
and devotion in this place, we avail ourselves of the 
thought and piety of many extinct ages. We reve- 
rently read those ancient scriptures, which have 
gathered around them the trust, and procured the 
heart-felt repose, of so many tribes and periods, since 
prophets and apostles first gave them forth. We 
sing the hymns which a goodly company of pious 
men have left as the record of their communion with 
Heaven. And it is impossible to look at the conse- 
crated names of those 1 sweet singers' of Christendom, 
without feeling ennobled by their communion, and 
even astonished at our sympathy with them. Do not 
we, the living, take up, in adoration and prayer, the 
thoughts of the dead, and feel them divinely true ? 
Do they not come forth, as if fresh-coined from our 
own hearts ? Indeed, could we ourselves so faith- 
fully utter the consciousness of our inner being, or 
shape so interpreting a voice for our secret life ? 
What an impressive testimony this to the sameness 
of our nature through every age, and the immortal 
perseverance of its holier affections ! The language 
of their confessions, their struggles, their desires, 
speaks our own; the light that gladdened them, 
15* 



174 THE COMMUNION OF SAINTS. 

shines now upon our hearts ; and the mists they 
could not penetrate, brood now upon our path. There 
is the choice minstrel of Israel, true alike to the spirit 
of mourning or of joy ; there are the venerable fathers 
of the ancient church, whose vespers, chanted cen- 
turies ago, will suit this night as well; there is the 
adamantine yet genial Luther, telling, with the 
severity of an eye-witness, the awfulness of judg- 
ment; there is the noble Milton, breathing his sweet 
and rugged music out of darkness ; there is the 
afflicted Cowper, sending out the tenderest strains 
from his benighted spirit ; with an attendant multi- 
tude of the faithful, — the confessor, the exile, the 
missionary, — a chorus of sublime voices, with which 
it is a sacred privilege to be in harmony. And these 
are not merely the accents of the past, but the anthem 
of the sainted dead, — the strains of immortals that 
look back upon their toils, and behold us singing 
their songs of sadness here, while they have already 
learned the melodies of everlasting joy. Blessed 
communion of earth with Heaven ! making us truly 
one family, below, above ; and rendering us fellow- 
citizens with the saints, and of the very household of 
God! 

And soon we too shall drop the note of earthly 
aspiration, and join that upper anthem of diviner 
love. The hour cometh, when we shall cease the 
mournful cry with which earth must ever pray to 
Heaven, and grief ask pity to its tears, and the 
tempted call for help in the crisis of danger, and the 
laboring will implore a freshened strength. Exiles 
as yet from the spirit of unanxious joy, we catch 
but the echoes of that heavenly peace, and yield 
response but faint and low. Yet even now the free 



THE COMMUNION OF SAINTS. 



175 



heart of the happy and triumphant shall be ours, in 
proportion as we are true to the condition of faithful 
service, which alone can make us one with them. 
The communion of saints brings to us their conflict 
first, their blessings afterwards ; those who will not 
with much patience strive with the evil, can have no 
dear fellowship with the good ; we must weep their 
tears, ere we can win their peace. This sorrowful 
condition once accepted, the sympathies of Heaven 
are not slow to arise within the soul ; it is the tension 
of sacred toil, that on the touch of every breath of 
life brings music from the chords of love. And then 
the tone that here sinks in the silence of death, shall 
there swell into an immortal's fuller praise. We 
shall leave it to others to take up the supplicating 
strain; shall join the emancipated brotherhood of 
the departed; and in our turn look down on the 
outstretched hands of our children, waiting our wel- 
come and embrace. O ! may the Great Father, in 
his own fit time, unite in one the parted family of 
heaven and earth! 



XIV. 



CHRIST'S TREATMENT OF GUILT. 
Luke v. 8. 

DEPART FROM ME ; FOR I AM A SINFUL MAN, 0 LORD ! 

When Simeon, on the verge of life, uttered his 
parting hymn within the temple, he told Mary, with 
the infant Jesus in his arms, that, by that child, ' the 
thoughts of many hearts should be revealed.' Never 
was prophecy more true; nor ever perhaps the mis- 
sion of our religion more faithfully denned. For 
wherever it has spread, it has operated like a new 
and diviner conscience to the world ; imparting to the 
human mind a profounder insight into itself; opening 
to its consciousness fresh powers and better aspira- 
tions; and penetrating it with a sense of imperfection, 
a concern for the moral frailties of the will, charac- 
teristic of no earlier age. The spirit of religious 
penitence, the solemn confession of unfaithfulness, the 
prayer for mercy, are the growth of our nature trained 
in the school of Christ. The pure image of his mind, 
as it has passed from land to land, has taught men 
more of their own hearts than all the ancient aphor- 
isms of self-knowledge; has inspired more sadness at 
the evil, more noble hope for the good that is hidden 
there; and has placed within reach of even the igno- 
rant, the neglected, and the young, severer principles 
of self-scrutiny than philosophy had ever attained. 



cueist's treatment op guilt. 



177 



The radiance of so great a sanctity has deepened the 
shades of conscious sin. The savage convert, who 
before knew nothing more sacred than revenge and 
war, is brought to Jesus, and, as he listens to that 
voice, feels the stain of blood growing distinct upon 
his soul. The voluptuary, never before disturbed 
from his self-indulgence, comes within the atmos- 
phere of Christ's spirit; and it is as if a gale of heaven 
fanned his fevered brow, and convinced him that he 
is not in health. The ambitious priest, revolving 
plans for using men's passions as tools of his aggran- 
dizement, starts to find himself the disciple of one 
who, when the people would have made him king, 
fled direct to solitude and prayer. The forward 
child blushes to think how little there is in him of the 
infant meekness which Jesus praised ; and feels that, 
had he been there, he must have missed the benedic- 
tion, or, more bitter still, have wept to know it mis- 
applied. Nay, so deep and solemn did the sense 
of guilt become under the influence of Christian 
thoughts, that at length the overburthened heart of 
fervent times could endure the weight no longer; the 
Confessional arose, to relieve it and restore a periodic 
peace ; and it became the chief object of the widest 
sacerdotal order which the world has ever seen, to 
soothe the sobs, and listen to the whispered record, of 
human penitence. Cities, too, as if conscious of their 
corruption, bid the silent minster rise amid their 
streets, where, instead of the short daily or sabbath 
service, unceasing, eternal orisons might be said for 
sin ; where the door might open to the touch all day, 
and the lamp be seen beneath the vault by night, and 
the passer by, caught by the low chant, might be 
tempted to interrupt the chase of vanity without, for 



178 



Christ's treatment of guilt. 



the peace of prayer within. And so, in every ancient 
village church of Europe, there is a corner that has 
been moistened with the burning tears of many gen- 
erations, and witness to the confessions and griefs 
that prove the children's conscience and affections to 
be such as their Father's were ; and the cathedral 
aisle, emblem of the mighty heart of Christendom, 
has for centuries been swelled with the plaint of a 
repentant music, shedding its sighs aloft into the spire, 
as if to reach and kiss the feet of God. In private 
dwellings, too, from the hearts of parents and of 
children, every morning and evening for ages past has 
seen many sad and lowly prayers ascend. Every- 
where the Christian mind proclaims its need of mercy, 
and bends beneath the oppression of its guilt; and 
since Jesus began to 'reveal the thoughts of many 
hearts,' Christendom, with clasped hands, has fallen 
at his feet and cried, ' We are sinful men, O Lord ! ' 

In nurturing this sentiment, in producing this 
solemn estimate of moral evil and quick perception 
of its existence, the religion of Christ does but per- 
petuate the influence of his personal ministry, and 
give prominence, on the theatre of the world, to the 
feature which singularly distinguished his life, viz. 
his treatment of the guilty. It is as if he dwelt among 
us still, and we saw him vexed and saddened by our 
evil passions, and travelled with him on the way, and 
felt his eye of gentleness and purity upon our homes, 
and he told us that c we know not what spirit we are 
of,' and by these very words caused us to know it 
instantly. Nor can we obtain any juster and deeper 
impressions of the temptations of life, and the ten- 
dencies of all wrong desires, than by seizing that 
view of moral evil, which dictated the mercies and 
the severities of his lips and life. 



Christ's treatment of guilt. 



179 



He lived amid dark passions and in evil days. 
Profligates and outcasts were near him ; the ambi- 
tious and ignorant were his disciples ; hypocrites con- 
spired against him ; and treachery was ready to be 
their tool. He had to encounter malignant designs 
directed against himself, and selfish arts of delusion 
practised on the people ; to deal at one time with the 
despised but affectionate penitent; at another, with 
recently-detected shame ; and again, with artifice and 
insincere pretension hardened into system, and ad- 
ministered by established authority. And in all 
is visible the same spirit of blended sanctity and 
humanity, adapting itself, with versatile power, to 
every emergency. 

The guilty passions of his countrymen continually 
approached himself. They haunted this whole min- 
istry, and hated him as soon as disciples began to love. 
They mixed with the multitudes whom he taught 
upon the hills; and he saw their evil eye peering on 
him and watching his words from amid the throngs 
that flocked round him in the temple. But they 
never embarrassed the flow of his dignified utterance, 
or fluttered his spirit with a moment's resentment. 
On occasion of the Feast of Tabernacles, — that 
annual jubilee of Jerusalem's heart, when the trees 
were robbed of their branches to turn the street into 
an olive-ground, and make the city as verdant as the 
hills, — all was done that enmity could effect, to over- 
cast his share of the national joy, to silence his teach- 
ings to the wondering people, and stop his efforts to 
extract from the picturesque and festive rites some 
lesson of gladder tidings and deeper wisdom. He 
saw amid the crowd the officers sent to take him, 
the wily steps and hesitating wills with which they 



180 



Christ's treatment of guilt. 



tracked his wanderings over the temple courts, the 
mutual whispers dropping into fixed attention with 
which they listened to him here and there. He 
stepped forward, and they recoiled, as he told them, 
with an air of divinest quietude, that he should be 
there yet longer, but no hand would touch him, and 
then he should be sequestered in a place which their 
violence could not reach. And there, day after day, 
they saw him still gladdening attentive hearts, and 
felt him subduing their own, so that again and again 
they ceased to be his enemies and became his follow- 
ers ; till on the last great day, they beheld him stand- 
ing aloft on the precipitous edge of Moriah's rock, 
watching the procession that climbed with the water- 
bowl from Siloam's stream below, and as it entered 
with its pure libation, heard him pronounce that 
solemn invitation, 'If any man thirsts, let him come 
unto me and drink of living waters.' They returned, 
and the attestation burst from their lips, 4 Never man 
spake like this man.' 

Nor was it merely that he regarded these men as 
the poor menials of others' designs, — hirelings of 
guiltier men. For the same impersonal tranquillity 
appears when he is in contact with the original agents, 
who endeavored to crush his cause, and actually com- 
passed his death. Whatever the agony of Gethsem- 
ane may have been, it was no agony of resentment ; 
the controversy of that bitter hour was with the 
Father whom he loved, not with enemies whom he 
feared. Indeed, the nearer these enemies came, 
the more did the serene power of his spirit rise. 
After those convulsive prayers which had pierced 
the midnight, it seemed as if angel-thoughts had 
stolen in to strengthen him. At the moment when 



Christ's treatment of guilt. 181 

the tramp of feet was first heard upon the bridge of 
Kedron, and the torches as they passed, flashed upon 
its rapid waters, he was prostrate in a devotion from 
which tears and struggles had now passed away. 
When, later still, the hum of approaching voices 
became distinct, and the lights gleamed nearer and 
nearer through the trees, he was bending over his 
waking disciples, who overheard him breathing the 
wish, that they could indeed sleep on through the 
severities of that dreadful day, and be saved from 
the faithless desertion, the memory of which would 
be ever bitter. And when at length the armed band 
confronts them, and he startles them by stepping 
forth in answer to his name; when the kiss of be- 
trayal has been given, and the momentary affray 
which Peter had challenged has been stopped by his 
healing power; when all are moving from the place 
with sullen haste, — the priests, doubtless eager to be 
back within the city before it can be discovered by 
what nocturnal exploit they, the conservators of law 
and right, have sullied their dignity, — Jesus dives at 
once into their conscience, flurried already with fear 
and guilt, and asks, why such holy men, whom often 
he has seen listening to his daily teachings, should 
choose so ruffian a way, and so strange an hour, for a 
deed of public justice? Throughout the scenes which 
followed, you well know how Jesus maintained the 
same majestic and unruffled spirit; seeming nobler 
with every indignity, and of prompter self-forgetful- 
ness with every added suffering ; yet visibly agitating 
every party before whom he was brought, with the 
consciousness of crime and horror in the transactions 
of which he was the forgiving victim. Look where 
we may, it is clear that resentment had not the 

16 



182 



Christ's treatment of guilt. 



faintest share in Christ's feeling towards wrong; that 
it was directed against himself, afforded no induce- 
ment for a severer or more excited estimate of its 
enormity. He put it at a distance from him ; its 
relations to its authors and to others impressed him 
more than the suffering it brought upon himself; and 
every one must perceive that his eye is fixed, not 
on its cruelty, but on its awfulness, its blindness, its 
guilt. 

Yet did our Lord give no sanction to the morbid 
doctrine of a sentimental fatalism, which forbids us 
ever to be angry with the wicked, talks whiningly 
of our common frailty, draws an immoral comfort 
from God's way of educing good from evil, and com- 
prises all possible cases of duty to wrongdoers under 
one formula, ( Pity and forgive.' In nothing do we 
notice the depth and truth of his moral perception 
more clearly than in its different treatment of vice in 
its several forms and stages. When he comes before 
' Scribes and Pharisees, Hypocrites,' we do not hear 
the tones of forgiveness, the pleadings of the mild 
apologist for human infirmity, the effeminate offer of 
a futile pity. He pours forth an intense stream of 
natural indignation, and blights them with the flash 
of a terrible invective; he tears the veil from every 
foul purpose, and with severe justice brands every 
deed with its own black name. Here, exposure, not 
compassion, is the proper impulse and duty of a noble 
mind; for the people must be deluded no more, their 
reason perplexed with wretched quibbles, and their 
too-trusting conscience corrupted by the sophistries 
of sin. It were poor generosity, from tenderness to a 
selfish faction, to let the good heart of the nation die. 
Nay, even for these deceivers themselves, this expres- 



Christ's treatment of guilt. 



183 



sion of mora] anger was precisely the most salutary 
appeal. For it echoed the secret sentence of their 
own hearts, with which compassion would have been 
altogether discordant. The self-condemnation, only 
whispered before, it sent in thunder through their hol- 
low souls ; bringing many a hearer to tremble at the 
shock, who would have scoffed at pity as a weak 
and puling thing. This principle, of simply giving 
voice to the present sentiments of the conscience, and 
administering the feelings for which its natural justice 
was making a demand, Jesus appears intuitively to 
have followed in all his dealings with the vicious. 
When he reclined at the table of the Pharisee, and 
shocked him by allowing a woman who had been a 
sinner to find admission on the plea of discipleship, 
and the new reverential affections of her nature broke 
forth in passionate gratitude, he gave no check and 
no rebuke, nor simply a cautious sanction. The con- 
victions, which rebuke serves to awaken, were already 
there ; to reproach would be to crush the fallen. She 
had discovered the depth of her misery, and yearned 
for the profound compassion suited to so great a 
woe. Jesus knew that one who had been stricken by 
a love so pure and penitential as hers, needed only to 
have that love fostered and trained to act; and so, 
casting himself with a bold faith on the capacities of 
a truly melted soul, he declared her sins forgiven. 
But where, again, no such penitence appeared, and the 
resort to him was not spontaneous, but compulsory, 
as in the case of the woman taken in adultery, he ob- 
served a striking neutrality of treatment. To a mind 
heated with so dreadful and public a shame, to 
administer reproach would be cruelty, to give conso- 
lation would be danger; and he simply wards off the 



184 



Christ's treatment oe guilt. 



savage penalties of the law, and turns all his direct 
dealings upon her foul and sanctimonious informers. 
Their conscience persuades them that he knows their 
secret history, and they skulk away, the accused in- 
stead of the accusers ; while on the people that stand 
by is impressed the awful truth, that sinners are not 
fit to judge of sin. The blindness which is induced 
by all deliberate injury to our moral nature, and 
which thickens its film as the habit grows, is one of 
the most appalling expressions of the justice of God. 
Moral evil is the only thing in his creation of which 
it is decreed, that the more we are familiar with it, 
the less shall we know of it. The mind that is rich 
in holiness and the humanities, appreciates every 
temptation, computes the force of every passion, and 
discerns the degradation of every vice, with a pre- 
cision and clearness unknown to the adept in wrong. 
When that wretched woman stood alone and con- 
founded before Christ, how little did she know of her 
own abased and abject mind, how much less of the 
majestic being before her, whose steady eye, as it 
looked upon her, she could not meet! Yet how vividly, 
and with what results of considerate yet cautious 
sympathy, did the disorder of her moral nature pre- 
sent itself to him who knew no defilement! Like 
the pure and silent stars that look down by night 
upon the foulness and the din of cities, his heavenly 
spirit gazed direct into the turbid hiding-places of sin. 
He saw it, indeed, simply as it will see itself in retro- 
spect; not perhaps any retrospect in this life; but 
such as may be inevitable, when the exchange of 
worlds takes place ; when the urgency of pursuit and 
the distractions of amusement shall have ceased, and 
left us alone with our characters and our God; when, 



Christ's treatment of guilt. 



185 



one order of employments being ended, and the other 
not yet commenced, there comes the appointed pause 
for thought and judgment ; and having waved the 
last adieu, we flit away along that noiseless journey, 
on which we bear with us only the memory of the 
Past, to knock at the awful gates of the unopened 
Future. 

What that retrospect may be, it is fearful, but not 
impossible, to think. To aid the thought, it has been 
remarked by one of the most distinguished physical 
philosophers of our own day, that no atmospheric 
vibration ever becomes extinct ; that the pulses of 
speech, when they have done their work and become 
to our ear inaudible, pass in waves away, but wander 
still, reflected hither and thither, through the regions 
of the air eternally. He conceives that, as the atmos- 
phere comprises still within itself the distinct trace of 
every sound impressed on any portion of it, — as 
thus the record indestructibly exists, — we have only 
to suffer a change of position, and receive the en- 
dowment of an acuter sense, to hear again every idle 
word that we have spoken, and every sigh that we 
have caused. The truth is, that already, and within 
the limits of our mental nature, there is a power that 
will effect all this ; it is fully within the scope of our 
natural faculties of association and memory. It may 
be doubted whether any idea once in the mind is 
ever lost, and past recall ; it may drop, indeed, into 
the gulf of forgotten things, and the waves of succes- 
sive thought roll over it ; but there are in nature 
possible and even inevitable convulsions which dis- 
place the waters, heave up the deep, and disentomb 
whatever may be fair or hideous there. There needs 
only that associated objects should be presented, and 

16* 



186 



chkist's treatment of guilt. 



the whole past, its most trivial features even, — the 
remnant of a school-boy task, or the mere snatches of 
a dream, — will rise up to view. Make but a pil- 
grimage to the scenes of your early days, when more 
than half of life is gone ; wander again over the 
peaceful fields, and stand on the brink of the yet 
gliding stream, that were the witnesses of youthful 
sports and cares ; and are they not the records of 
them too ? Does not remembrance seem inspired, 
and commissioned to render back the dead ? And 
do they not come crowding on your sense, — faces 
and voices, and moving shapes, and the tones of bells, 
and the very feelings too which these things awak- 
ened once ? It is remarkable how slight a suggestion 
is occasionally sufficient to bring back vast trains of 
emotion. There are cases in which some particular 
function of the memory acquires an exquisite sen- 
sibility ; and usually, as if God would warn us what 
must happen when our moral nature is divorced from 
the physical, it is the memory of conscience that 
maintains this preternatural watch. In many an 
hospital of mental disease (as it is called), you have 
doubtless seen a melancholy being pacing to and fro 
with rapid strides, and lost to every thing around ; 
wringing his hands in incommunicable suffering, and 
letting fall a low mutter rising quickly into the shrill 
cry; his features cut with the graver of sharp an- 
guish; his eyelids drooping (for he never sleeps), and 
showering ever scalding tears. It is the maniac of 
remorse ; possibly, indeed, made wretched by merely 
imaginary crimes ; but just as possibly maddened by 
too true a recollection, and what the world would 
esteem too scrupulous a conscience. Listen to him, 
and you will often be surprised into fresh pity, to find 



Christ's treatment of guilt. 



187 



how seemingly slight are the offences, — injuries 
perhaps of mere unripened thought, — which feed 
the fires, and whirl the lash, of this incessant woe. 
He is the dread type of Hell. He is absolutely 
sequestered (as any mind may be hereafter), incar- 
cerated alone with his memories of sin ; and that is 
all. He is unconscious of objects and unaware of 
time ; and every guilty soul may find itself, likewise, 
standing alone in a theatre peopled with the collected 
images of the ills that he hath done ; and, turn where 
he may, the features he has made sad with grief, the 
eyes he has lighted with passion, the infant faces he 
has suffused with needless tears, stare upon him with 
insufferable fixedness. And if thus the past be truly 
indestructible; — if thus its fragments maybe re- 
gathered, if its details of evil thought and act may be 
thus brought together, and fused into one big agony, 
— why, it may be left to ' fools ' to ' make a mock 
at sin.' 



THE STRENGTH OF THE LONELY. 



John xvi. 32. 

behold the hour cometh, yea, is now come, that te shall be 
scattered, evert man to his own, and shall lea ye me alone ; 
and yet i am not alone, because the father is with me. 

The different degrees of self-reliance felt by differ- 
ent minds occasion some of the most marked diver- 
sities in the moral characters of men. There is a 
species of dependence upon others altogether distinct 
from empty-minded imitation ; implying no incapa- 
city of thought, no imbecility of judgment, but often 
connected with the best attributes of genius and the 
choicest fruits of cultivation. It is a tendency which 
has its root in the sensitive, not in the intellectual part 
of our nature ; and grows, not from the shallowness 
of the reason, but from the depth of the affections. 
It arises, indeed, from a disproportion between these 
two departments of the mind ; and would disappear, 
if force were either added to the understanding, or 
deducted from the feelings. It is the dependence of 
an affectionate mind, capable, it may be, of mani- 
festing great power, but trembling to feel itself 
alone; — of a mind that has a natural affinity for 
sympathy, and cannot endure its loss or its postpone- 
ment ; but on whatever course of thought or action 
the faculties may launch forth, finds them insensibly 



THE STRENGTH OF THE LONELY. 



189 



tending towards it for shelter. This temper is not to 
be confounded with the vulgar and selfish craving 
after applause, that has no test of truth and right but 
the voice of a multitude, and will sell its conscience 
to buy off a frown. The feeling to which I refer, 
cares not for numbers or for praise ; it deprecates 
nothing but perfect solitude. It has but one reser- 
vation in its pursuit of truth and reverence for duty, 
that they shall not drift it away from every human 
support. Place near it some one approving and fra- 
ternal heart, and its self-respect rises at once ; it can 
listen unabashed to scorn ; it can stand up against a 
menace with dignity ; it can thrust aside resistance 
with energy. Lay to rest the trembling spirit of hu- 
manity within, and the diviner impulses of the soul 
will start to their supremacy. 

This state of mind may be illustrated by reference 
to its extreme opposite ; and the contrast may bring 
out in clearer light the strength and weaknesses of 
both. There are persons to be occasionally found 
whose minds appear to perform their operations as if 
they were in empty space ; who reflect, and plan, 
and feel in secret ; of whose processes of thought no 
one knows any thing more than happens to be indi- 
cated by the result ; who look on men and events 
only as instruments for the execution of their de- 
signs ; who are little damped by universal discour- 
agement, or elated by universal approbation ; and 
rarely modify an opinion or repent of a feeling, how- 
ever singular may be their position in maintaining it. 
If others agree with their designs, it is so much force 
to be reckoned in their favor ; if they disagree, it is 
so much resistance to be overcome. Human ties are 
formed, and their energies are not improved ; are 



190 



THE STRENGTH OF THE LONELY. 



broken, and their energies are not weakened. In 
trouble, they apply themselves so promptly to the 
remedy, that, when you offer your sympathy, it is 
not wanted ; they are fond of the maxim, ' a good 
man is satisfied from himself;' — and so truly act 
upon it, that the genial heart and helping hand in- 
stinctively shrink back from their hard complacent 
presence. 

Each of these two forms of human character has 
a certain species of power of its own. He who is 
independent of sympathy is remarkable for power 
over himself. In speculation, his mind operates free 
from all disturbing forces ; he goes apart with his 
subject of contemplation, surveys it with a serene 
eye, converses with it as an abstraction, having no 
concern with any living interest. His faculties obey 
his summons, and perform their task with vigor, 
paralyzed by no anxiety, ruffled by no doubt, never 
lingering to plead awhile for some dear old error 
before it go, nor pausing to take the leap to truth 
entirely new. In action, his volitions are executed 
at once ; nothing intervenes (assuming him to be a 
man of honest purpose) between his seeing a course 
of wisdom and rectitude, and his taking it ; he yields 
nothing to his own habits ; he waits for no man's 
support ; if they yield it, it will show their good 
sense ; if they withhold it, it is the worse for them- 
selves. He scorns concession either to others or to 
himself ; not in truth comprehending the temptation 
to it. The past and the human have no power over 
him ; he needs no gathering of strength to tear him- 
self away ; all his roots strike at once into his own 
present convictions ; and whatever opposition may 
beat on him from the elements around, does but serve 



THE STRENGTH OF THE LONELY. 



191 



to harden them to rock, and fix him there with im- 
mutable tenacity. 

On the other hand, he who is dependent on human 
sympathy acquires far greater power over others. He 
reflects and reciprocates the emotions of other minds ; 
he understands their prejudices ; he is no stranger to 
their weaknesses ; he does not stare at their impulses, 
like a being too sublime to comprehend them. He 
may not obtain that kind of distant respect which is 
yielded to the man of cold but acute and confident 
intellect ; a respect which is founded in fear, which 
suppresses opposition without winning trust, which 
silences objectors without relieving their objections, 
that unsatisfactory respect which we feel when con- 
scious that another is right, without perceiving where 
it is that we are wrong. But he may earn that better 
power, which arises from profound and affectionate 
knowledge of the human heart. There is no human 
being to whom we look with so true a faith, as to 
him who shows himself deep-read in the mysteries 
within us ; who seems to have dwelt where Omni- 
science only had access, and traced momentary lines 
of feeling whose rapid flash our own eye could 
scarcely follow; who put into words weaknesses 
which we had hardly dared to confess in thought ; 
who appears to have trembled with our own anxie- 
ties, and wept our very tears. This initiation into 
the interior nature is the quality which, above all 
others, gives one mind power over another. If it 
comes upon us from the living tones of a friendly 
voice, we listen as to the breathings of inspiration ; 
if it act on us only from the pages of a book, the 
enchantment is hardly less potent. That a being, 
distant and unknown, perhaps departed, should have 



192 



THE STRENGTH OF THE LONELY. 



so penetrated our subtlest emotions, and caught our 
most transient attitudes of thought, should have so 
detected our sophistries of conscience, and witnessed 
the miseries of our temptations, and known the sa- 
credness of our affections, that we appear revealed 
anew even to ourselves, truly seems the greatest of 
the triumphs of genius. It is a triumph peculiar to 
those who love the sympathies of their kind, and, 
because they love them, instinctively appreciate and 
understand them. It is essentially the triumph which 
Christ won when the minions of tyranny and hypoc- 
risy shrunk back from him in awe, saying, ' Never 
man spake like this man.' 

With this quality, however, great feebleness of will, 
and even total prostration of moral power, may some- 
times be found combined ; and we may almost say, 
the greater the intellectual endowments, the more 
likely is this to be the case. If ordinary minds want 
sympathy before they can act freely, they can easily 
obtain it ; their ideas and feelings are of the common 
staple of humanity, and some one who has them too 
may be found across the street. But if those of finer 
mould should have the same dependence of heart, it 
may prove a sore affliction and temptation to them; 
for who will respond to the desires, and aims, and 
emotions most dear to them ? They wed themselves to 
a benevolent scheme ; it is thrust aside as a chimera. 
They demonstrate a truth of startling magnitude ; 
it is acknowledged and passed by. They describe 
some misery of the poor, the child, or the guilty ; the 
world weeps, and the oppression is untouched. They 
pour forth their conceptions of perfect character, and 
seek to refresh in men's minds the bewildered senti- 
ment of right ; every conscience approves, and not a 



THE STRENGTH OF THE LONELY. 



193 



volition stirs. And thus they are left alone, without 
the practical support of a single sympathy. What 
wonder that they think in one way, and .act in 
another, when the world reverences their thoughts, 
and ridicules their actions ? Compelled by their 
nature to desire, what they are forbidden by men to 
execute; unable to love any thing but that which 
is pronounced to be fit only for a dream; secretly 
dwelling within a beauty of excellence which they 
would be held insane to realize, — what wonder is it, 
if their practical energies die of dearth, — if they 
begin to doubt their nobler nature, and, while cher- 
ishing it in private, dishonor it in the world ; if the 
pure sincerity of their mind is thus at length broken 
down, and they soil in act the spirit which they 
sanctify in thought ; and life wastes away in habits, 
on which the meditations of privacy pour a flood of 
ineffectual shame, and in impulses to better things, 
more and more passionate, as the springs of the 
will become broken, and prayers for peace of more 
mournful earnestness, as the vision sinks into melan- 
choly distance ? 

But the dangers of an excessive dependence upon 
sympathy are by no means confined to minds of this 
order. There are, within the range of every man's 
life, processes of mind which must be solitary ; pas- 
sages of duty which throw him absolutely upon his 
individual moral forces, and admit of no aid what- 
ever from another. Alone we must stand sometimes ; 
and if our better nature is not to shrink into weak- 
ness, we must take with us the thought which was 
the strength of Christ: ' Yet I am not alone, for the 
Father is with me.' Jesus was evidently susceptible, 
in a singular degree, to the influence of human at- 
17 



194 



THE STKENGTH OF THE LONELY. 



tachments ; he was the type of that form of character. 
Such, indeed, it behoved one to be who was to be 
regarded as the perfect model of humanity ; for while 
the self-relying and solitary temper rarely, if ever, 
acquires the grace and bloom of human sympathies, 
the mind, originally affectionate, often, by efforts of 
moral principle, rises to independent strength ; the 
sense of right can more readily indurate the tender 
than melt the rocky soul. And that is the most 
finished character which begins in beauty, and ends 
in power ; which wins its way to loftiness through a 
host of angelic humanities that would sometimes 
hold it back ; that leans on the love of kindred while 
it may, and when it may not, can stand erect in the 
love of God ; that shelters itself amid the domestici- 
ties of life, while duty wills, and when it forbids, can 
go forth under the expanse of immortality, and face 
any storm that beats, and traverse any wilderness 
that lies, beneath that canopy. The sentiment of 
Christ in my text, carried into the solitary portions 
of our existence, is the true power by which to ac- 
quire this perfection. What these solitary portions 
are will readily occur to every thoughtful mind. An 
example or two may be briefly noticed. 

The vigils of sickness, — of those, I mean, who 
watch by the bed of sickness, — are solitary beyond 
expression. What loneliness like that, which is the 
more dreadful in proportion as the friend stretched 
at our right hand is more beloved ? Those midnight 
hours, poised between life and death, that seem to 
belong neither to time nor to eternity, — claimed by 
time, when we listen to the tolling clock, — by eter- 
nity, when we hear that moaning breath ; that 
silence, so solid that we cannot breathe into it, so 



THE STRENGTH OP THE LONELY. 



195 



awful that we dare not weep, and which yet we 
shudder to hear broken by the mutterings of deliri- 
um ; that confused flitting of thoughts across our 
exhausted minds, strangely mingling the trivial and 
the solemn, — beginning perhaps from the grotesque 
shapes of a moon-lit cloud, then sinking us deep into 
dreams of the past, till a rustling near calls us to 
give the cup of cold water, and that fevered eye that 
looks on us makes us think, where soon will be the 
perturbed spirit that lights it! — Oh, what relief can 
be to this agony, what trust amid this despair, but in 
the remembrance, ' I am not alone, for my Father is 
with me ? ' Serene as the star in the cool heavens 
without, gentle as the loving heart whose ebbing life 
we watch, his Infinite mind has its vigils with us, — 
the vigils of eternal Providence, beneath whose eye, 
awake alike over both worlds, sorrow and death 
vanish away. Into what peace do the terrible aspects 
of things around subside under that thought! We 
are no longer broken upon the wheel of fatalism, 
given over to fruitless and unmeaning suffering ; the 
feeling that life is going wrong, that all things are 
dropping into wreck, disappears. We rise to a loftier 
point of view, and perceive how all this may lie 
within the perfect order of benignity ; how death in 
this world may be determined by the laws of birth 
into another; how our sensitive is connected with 
our moral nature, and from deep trial great strength 
may grow, — the capacious and enduring mind, the 
hardy and athletic will, the refined and gentle heart, 
the devoted spirit of duty. Enfolded within the 
Divine Paternity, there is one fixed and tranquil ob- 
ject of our thoughts. From that centre of repose we 
can look forth on the fitfulness of sickness without 



196 



THE STRENGTH OP THE LONELY. 



despair ; the flying shadows of fear seem cast by an 
orb of everlasting light. He that in this spirit meets 
the trembling moments of life, will gather the sub- 
limest power from events that seem to crush him, 
and come forth from the mourner's watch, not with 
wasted and haggard mind, not morose and selfish, 
not with passive and helpless air, as if waiting- to be 
the sport of every blast that beats, but with uplifted 
conscience, with will meeker towards others, and 
sterner towards the energy of the hero, and the calm- 
ness of the saint. 

Again, we must be solitary when we are tempted. 
The management of the character, the correction of 
evil habits, the suppression of wrong desires, the 
creation of new virtues, — this is a work strictly 
individual, with which no ' stranger intermeddleth,' 
in which the sympathy of friends may be deceptive, 
and our only safety is in a superhuman reliance. 
The relation of the human being to God is altogether 
personal ; there can be no partnership in its responsi- 
bilities. Our moral convictions must have an undi- 
vided allegiance ; and to withhold our reverence till 
they are supported by the suffrages of others, is an 
insult which they will not bear. What can those 
even who read us best know of our weaknesses, and 
wants and capabilities ? They would have to clothe 
themselves with our very consciousness, before they 
could be fit advisers here. How often does their 
very affection become our temptation, cheat us out 
of our contrition, and lead us to adopt some pleasant 
theory about ourselves, in place of the stern and 
melancholy truth ! How often does their erring judg- 
ment lead us to indolence and self-indulgence, to a 
dalliance with our infirmities, and a fatal patience 



THE STRENGTH OF THE LONELY. 197 

with our sins ! If, indeed, there were a more preva- 
lent conscientiousness in the distribution of praise 
and blame ; if all men felt how serious a thing it is 
to dispense such mighty powers, friends might con- 
sult together with greater security respecting their 
moral failures and obligations ; penitence might pour 
itself forth in a species of auricular confession no 
less safe than natural ; the sense of wrong would 
become more profound, when the violation of duty 
had shaped itself into words ; and the secret sugges- 
tions and resolves of conscience be doubly strong, 
when echoed by the living voice of human tenderness. 
Even then, however, we must vigilantly guard our 
own moral perceptions, clear the atmosphere between 
them and Heaven, and allow no sophistry to shade 
us from the eye of God. At best, we must often 
have to forego all sympathy; none can be with us in 
our multiform temptations. Many a purpose fit only 
for ourselves, suited to the peculiarities of our own 
character and condition, we must take up in private, 
and in silence pile up effort after effort, till it be 
accomplished. And in these lonely struggles of duty, 
in this invisible repression of wrong impulses and 
maintenance of great aims, the inevitable loss of 
human aid must be replaced by our affinity with 
God. While he is with us, we are not alone. He 
that invented human virtue, and breathed into us our 
private veneration for its greatness; He that loves 
the martyr spirit, scorning suffering for the sake of 
truth; He that beholds in every faithful mind the 
reflection of himself; He that hath built an everlast- 
ing world, at once the shelter of victorious goodness, 
and the theatre of its yet nobler triumphs, — enwraps 
us in his immensity, and sustains us by his love. 
17* 



198 THE STRENGTH OF THE LONELY. 

The sooner we learn to love him, and find comfort 
in the society of God, the better are we prepared for 
every solemn passage of our existence. It is well, 
ere we depart, to confide ourselves sometimes to the 
invisible ; for then, at least, we must be thrust forth 
upon it in a solitude personal as well as moral. The 
dying make that pass alone ; human voices fade 
away ; human forms retire ; familiar scenes sink 
from sight ; and silent and lonely the spirit migrates 
to the great secret. Who would not feel himself 
then beneath the all-sheltering wing, and say amid 
the mystic space, ' I am not alone, for the Father is 
with me ? ' 



XVI. 



HAND AND HEART. 
John xiv. 23. 

ip a man love me, he will keep my" words ; and my father 
will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our 
abode with him. 

There is no point in theoretical morality more 
difficult to determine (if we may judge from the 
disputes of philosophers), than the comparative worth 
and mutual relations of good affections and good 
actions. Ought it to be the direct and primary aim 
of the teacher of duty to produce a harvest of be- 
neficent deeds ? or to impart clear perceptions and 
prompt sensibility of conscience in relation to right 
and wrong ? If the former, his instructions will 
present an inventory and careful valuation of all 
possible ' voluntary acts ; ' and his exhortations be 
addressed to the hopes and fears, to the prudential 
apprehensions of good and evil, which operate im- 
mediately upon the will. If the latter, he will 
meddle little with cases of casuistry, or problems 
which exhibit duty as an object of doubt; will 
define and illuminate the secret image of right that 
dwells within every mind ; and present as incentives 
those models of high faith and disinterested virtue 
which kindle the reverence of the heart. In this 



200 



HAND AND HEART. 



country, especially among those who have been most 
anxious to 'enlighten' its religion, the predominant 
attention has been given to external morality. The 
practical temper of the English, impatient of loud 
profession and sanctimonious inconsistency, reason- 
ably enough cried out for '-fruiV Philosophy caught 
this spirit, and embodied it in a system of no small 
pretensions. Seeing that fine sentiments are worth- 
less without good deeds, the masters of this school 
have decided, that the affections have no excellence 
except as instruments for producing action ; that, 
intrinsically, they are all alike, without any distinc- 
tion of good or bad ; that moral qualities primarily 
attach merely to practice, derivatively only to the 
mental tendencies towards practice, and in any case 
are constituted by the effects of conduct in producing 
enjoyment or pain; that the moralist has no concern 
with the motives of an agent, provided he does that 
which is useful ; that the only measure of virtue, in 
short, is the amount of pleasure it creates. 

This system has been embraced and is still held 
by many Christians, chiefly among the churches 
within the sphere of Dr. Priestley's influence. It is 
expounded, in a form full of inconsistency and com- 
promise, by Dr. Paley, in a work whose popularity 
appears to me rather a discredit to England than an 
honor to him ; and though it has been a general 
favorite with irreligious moralists, and appears in 
natural reaction from the enthusiasm of the most 
earnest pietists, it has seldom been considered hostile 
to Christianity itself. This is no fit occasion for 
discussing its philosophical pretensions ; and were it 
not for the extent and nature of its practical in- 
fluence, it might be abandoned to the Academic 



HAND AND HEART. 



201 



Lecture-room, where the rigorous methods of thought 
necessary for its examination would not be mis- 
placed. But there is one particular view of it which 
may naturally enough be presented here. Its char- 
acteristic sentiment may be placed side by side with 
those of the Christian Morals, and the relation 
between them ascertained. And no one, I imagine, 
can perceive in it a trace of Christ's peculiar spirit ; 
few surely can be wholly unconscious of the wide 
variance between its leading ideas and his ; and all 
who have abandoned their minds to the impression 
of his teachings, must feel that he assigns a very 
different rank to the affectionate elements of charac- 
ter; that, not content with tasking the hand, he 
makes high demands upon the heart; that public 
benefit is subordinate with him to personal perfec- 
tion ; and that instead of merging the individual 
mind in the advantage of society, he is silent of the 
happiness of society, except as involved in the 
holiness of the individual. Nothing surely can be 
further from the spirit of Jesus than to measure 
excellence by the magnitude of its effects, rather 
than the purity of its principle ; else he would never 
have ranked the widow's mite above the vast dona- 
tives of vanity ; or have praised the profuse affection 
of the penitent that lavished on him costly offerings, 
esteeming them yet less precious than the conse- 
crating tribute of her tears. Here, it was not the 
deed whose usefulness gave worth to the disposition, 
but the disposition whose excellence gave value to 
the deed. And this is everywhere the character of 
Christianity. It plants us directly beneath an eye 
that looketh at the heart; it forgives, in that we 
' have loved much ; ' it throws away without com- 



202 



HAND AND HEART. 



punction the largest husk of ceremony, and treasures 
up the smallest seed of life; instead of sharpening 
us for casuistry, it prostrates us in worship ; reveals 
to us our inner nature, by bringing us in contact 
with God, who is a Spirit, and to whom we bear the 
likeness of child to parent ; gives us an intermediate 
image of him and of ourselves. Christ the meek 
and merciful, whose life was a prolonged expression 
of disinterestedness and love ; and imposes, as the 
sole condition of discipleship, ' faith in him,' — im- 
plicit trust, that is, in the spirit of his mind ; self- 
precipitation upon a piety and fidelity like his, with- 
out concession to expediency, without faltering in 
danger, without flight from suffering, without slack- 
ened step, though duty should conduct us straight 
into the arms of ignominy and death. 

That Christianity does make high demands upon 
our affections must then be admitted. Indeed this is 
virtually confessed by the enthusiastic forms into 
which it has burst, by the outbreak of fervor from 
which every new church is born, and the eager efforts 
made to sustain this vivid life. Nay, it is privately 
confessed by every cold and languid yet honest heart, 
that cannot lay open before it the story of Christ, 
without the secret consciousness of rebuke. It is 
confessed by the anxieties of many good minds, that 
are ashamed of the slow fires and faint light of their 
faith and love ; that can spur their will, more easily 
than kindle their affections ; and wish they were 
called upon only to do, and not also to feel. They 
cast about the vaguest and vainest efforts after deeper 
impressions of things holy and sublime ; they wonder 
at the apathy with which they dwell amid the infini- 
tude of God ; they convince themselves how untrue is 



HAND AND HEART. 



203 



that state of mind which treats the 1 seen and tem- 
poral' as if there were no 'unseen and eternal;' they 
assure themselves how terrible must be the disorder 
of that soul, whose springs of pure emotion are thus 
locked in death. But with all this they cannot shame, 
or reason, or terrify themselves into any nobler glow. 
The avenues of intellect, and judgment, and fear, are 
not those by which a new feeling is permitted to visit 
and refresh the heart. The ice cannot thaw itself; 
but must ask the warmer gales of heaven to blow, 
and the sun aloft to send more piercing beams. 
There is nothing vainer or more hopeless than the 
direct struggles of the mind to transform its own 
affections, to change by a fiat of volition the order 
of its tastes, and the intensity of its love. Self-inspi- 
ration is a contradiction ; and to suspend, by upheav- 
ings of the will, the force of habitual desire, is no less 
impossible than, by writhings of the muscles, to anni- 
hilate our own weight. 

This, you will say, is a hard doctrine ; that our 
religion demands that which our nature forbids, — in- 
vites a regeneration of the heart after which the will 
may strive in vain. Yet, I think, you must be con- 
scious of its truth, and acknowledge that no spasm of 
determination can make you regard with hate that 
which is now an object of your love. But if Christi- 
anity presents the perplexity, its spirit affords the 
solution. It shows us, indeed, that to gain a pure and 
noble mind, great in its aims, resolute in its means, 
strong with the invincibility of conscience, yet mel- 
lowed with reverential love, is the end of all our dis- 
cipline here. But it nowhere encourages a direct aim 
at this end, as if it could be reached by the struggles 
of a day, or of a year. It nowhere invites a morbid 



204 



HAND AND HEAST. 



gaze upon our own feelings, as if by self-vigilance we 
could look ourselves into perfection. In Christ it 
furnishes us with an image of divinest beauty, that 
we may turn our eye on that, not upon ourselves ; 
and perverse, even to disease, is the temper, which, 
instead of being engaged with that sublimest work of 
the great sculptor of souls, whines rather over its own 
deformity, and seeks to cure it by unnatural contor- 
tions. Christianity sends each faculty of our nature 
to its proper office; our veneration, to Christ; our 
wills, to their duty. It precipitates us on Action as 
the proper school of Affection; and, reversing the 
moralist's principle, values not the pure heart as the 
tool for producing serviceable deeds, but for the good 
deeds, as at once the expression and the nourishment 
of that greatest of possessions, a good mind. It was 
not by retiring into himself, but by going out of him- 
self, that Christ overcame the world ; not by spiritual 
pathology, and self-torture, but by veritable 'suffer- 
ings,' that he 'became perfect;' not by measuring his 
own emotions, but by oblivion of them amid a crowd 
of toils, a succession of fulfilled resolves, a profuse 
expenditure of life and effort having others for their 
object, that he rose above the dignity of men. and 
ripened the divinest spirit of the skies. 

Struck, then, by the word of Christ, the moral para- 
lytic must ' take up his bed and walk.' It is surprising 
( how practical duty enriches the fancy and the heart, 
and action clears and deepens the affections. Like 
the run into the green fields and morning air to the 
fevered limbs and tightened brow of the night-student, 
it circulates a stream of unspeakable refreshment, 
1 and renews our strength as the eagle's.' Indeed, no 
one can have a true idea of right, until he does it ; 



HAND AND HEAHT. 



205 



any genuine reverence for it, till he has done it often i 
and with cost; any peace ineffable in it, till he does 
it always and with alacrity. Does any one complain, 
that the best affections are transient visitors with him, 
and the heavenly spirit a stranger to his heart? O 
let him not go forth, on any strained wing of thought, 
in distant 'guest of them ; but rather stay at home, 
and set his house in the true order of conscience ; and 
of their own accord the divinest guests will enter: he 
hath 'kept the words' of Christ, and the 'Father him- 
self will love him,' and they 'will come unto him, and 
make their abode with him.' The man most gifted 
with genius and rich in intellectual wisdom, but 
withal barren of practice and self-indulgent, can call 
up before him no conception of moral excellence so 
authentic, so divine, as many an obscure disciple, 
who through frequent tribulation, has done and borne 
the perfect will of God. Even the smallest discon- 
tent of conscience may render turbid the whole tem- 
per of the mind ; but only produce the effort that 
restores its peace, and over the whole atmosphere a 
breath of unexpected purity is spread ; doubt and irri- 
tability pass as clouds away; the withered sympathies 
of earth and home open their leaves and live ; and 
through the clearest blue the deep is seen of the 
heaven where God resides. And here, too, we may 
observe the opposite effects which action and experi- 
ence produce upon our preconceptions of wrong and 
of right. Do the right, and your ideal of it grows and 
perfects itself. Do the wrong, and your ideal of it 
breaks up and vanishes. The young and pure mind, 
stranger yet to the vehemence of appetite and revenge, 
looks on sin as a dreadful and demon image, shrinks 
with awe from its approach ; shudders at the laugh of 

18 



206 



HAND AND HEART. 



guilty revelry, and gazes on the face of acknowledged 
crime, as if it were a phantom of the abyss. Guilt is 
then a thing unearthly and preternatural, whose grasp 
is more terrible than death. And truly if this being 
now innocent should ever become its prey, it will be 
through a struggle deep and deadly, as with the tender 
mercies of a fiend. But once let that struggle be over, 
and the fiend vanishes for ever ; passes into plain flesh 
and blood, that 1 is by no means so dreadful as was 
imagined;' nay, even assumes the air of the jovial 
companion, and turns the dance of death into a 
comedy. The true 1 superstition ' of early years flies 
before the false i experience' of maturity. The ideal, 
so much juster than the actual, is gone; and there 
falls upon the heart that folly which < makes a mock 
at sin.' 

In saying that action is the school of affection, it 
is clear that we cannot mean mere manual or physical 
labor, or activity in business, or even the mechanical 
routine of any practical life, however unexceptionable 
be its habits. The regularities of constitutional good- 
ness, the order of a simply blameless existence, do not 
reach that pitch of energy which sustains the noblest 
health of the soul ; these may continue their accus- 
tomed course, and yet the springs of inward life and 
strength dry up. In the mere negative virtue which 
abstains from gross outward wrong, which commits 
neither theft, nor cruelty, nor excess, and paces the 
daily round of usage, there is not necessarily any 
principle of immortal growth. The force requisite to 
maintain it becomes continually less, as the obstruc- 
tions are worn down by ceaseless attrition ; and 
the character may hence become simply automatic, 
performing a series of regularities with the smallest 



HAND AND HEART. 



207 



expenditure of soul. To nourish high affections, 
worthy of a nature that hath kindred with the Father 
of spirits, more than this is needed; positive and 
creative power, spontaneous and original force, con- 
quering energy of resolve, must be put forth ; from the 
inner soul some central strength must pass upon the 
active life to destroy that equilibrium between within 
and without which makes our days mere self-repeti- 
tions, and to give us a progressive history. There is 
a connection profound and beautiful between the 
affectionate and the self-denying character of Christi- 
anity. The voluntary sacrifices feed the involuntary 
sympathies of virtue; and he that will daily suffer for 
his duty, nor lay his head to rest till he has renounced 
some ease, embraced some hardship, in the service of 
others and of God, shall replenish the fountains of his 
holiest life; and shall find his soul, not settling into 
the flat and stagnant marsh, but flowing under the 
most delicious light of heaven above, over the glad- 
dest fields of Providence below. I know that the 
moralists of whom I have before spoken, — they that 
turn the shrine of duty into a shop for weighing 
grains and scruples of enjoyment, — entertain a great 
horror of the notion of self-sacrifice, and ridicule the 
doctrine of denial as ascetic. Any interference with 
the luxury of virtue is to be deplored ; disturbance to 
its repose must be admitted to be disagreeable, and, 
'so far as it goes, an evil;' and though clashing pleas- 
ures will sometimes present themselves, we must 
take care never to let go the nearer, till we have in 
our hands the title-deeds of the remoter. It is sur- 
prising, we are told, how pleasant a thing true good- 
ness is, if we will only believe it. It may be so, or 
it may not be so; but, at all events, he who goes to it 



208 



HAND AND HEART. 



in this spirit has no true heart for it, and shall be re- 
fused the thing he seeks. God will have us surrender 
without terms ; and till then, we are fast prisoners, 
and not free children, in his universe. So needful is 
sacrifice to the health and hardihood of conscience, 
that if the occasions for it do not present themselves 
spontaneously in our lot, we must create them for 
ourselves; not reserving to ourselves those exercises 
of virtue which are constitutionally pleasant, but, on 
the contrary, esteeming the asperity of a duty as the 
reason why we should put our hand to it at once; not 
acquiescing in the facility of wisely adjusted habits, 
but accepting the ease of living well as the peremp- 
tory summons of God to live better. He, in short, is 
no true soldier of the Lord, nor worthy to bear the 
Christian armor, who, in service so high, will not 
make an hour's forced march of duty every day. So 
doing, the inner power, the athletic vigor, of our moral 
nature, will not waste and die. The perceptions of 
goodness, beauty, truth, become, when we are thus 
faithful, singularly clear. There ripens within us the 
fullest faith in the moral excellence of God ; the ties 
that bind us to him and to his children are drawn 
more closely round ; and in this world we dwell as 
in the lower mansion of his .house, where also the 
' Father loveth us, and maketh his abode with us.' 

By such practical performance alone, can any 
genuine love of man be matured in us. Beneficence 
is the true school of benevolence. We are not to 
wait till some descending spirit, uninvoked and un- 
earned, enters us, and makes the labor of sympathy 
delightful; but go and do the deed of mercy, though 
it be with reluctant step, with dry and parched 
spirit, and without the grace of a free charity. Per- 



HAND AND HEAPtT. 



209 



haps we may return with more genial mind and 
liberated affections ; and if not, we must the sooner 
and the oftener do the act of blessing again, though 
it be amid self-rebuke and shame, and recoil with no 
peace upon the soul. He that with patience will 
become the almoner of God to the poor and sad, and 
ask no portion of the blessing for himself, shall catch 
the spirit of the Divine love at length. Those whom 
he steadfastly benefits he will rejoice in at the end. 
Even with God this is the order too; we begin with 
being his beneficiaries, and end with being his chil- 
dren. He created us first (and that was blessing), 
placed us in the glory and immensity of his universe, 
and conferred upon us the high capacities and multi- 
form nature that make us his own image ; and then 
regarded us with the Divine affectionateness, and 
embraced us in his Everlasting Fatherhood. 

By such practical performance alone, can we dis- 
miss the clouds of doubt and ignoble mistrust, 
which, really covering our own disordered minds, 
seem to cast shadows around the Most High, and to 
blot out the heavens from us. The merely worldly 
man, interred amid mean cares, doubts the majestic 
truths of religion, simply from their sublimity and 
vastnest, which render them incommensurable with 
his poor fraction of a mind. Let him go and do a few 
noble deeds, and elevate the proportions of his nature, 
and it is wonderful what mighty things seem to be- 
come possible. Deity is near and even present at 
once, and immortality not improbable. And as for 
the self-inclosed and anxious student, his difficulties 
may be referred to the diseased and ascendant activity 
of a subtle understanding, without the materials of 
a deep moral experience on which to work. Let 
18* 



210 



HA>~D A>"D HEART. 



him remedy this fatal dearth; rouse the slumbering 
strength of conscience; and, quitting the theoretic 
problem, take up the practical responsibilities of life: 
and his work will clear his thought, rendering it not 
^ess acute, and more confiding and reverential. Seeing 
more into his own nature, he will penetrate further 
into all else, especially the source whence it pro- 
ceeds, the scene in which it is, and the issue to which 
it tends. Of all depressing scepticism, of all painful 
solicitude, not the agility of thought, but the alacrity 
of duty, is the fit antagonist. At least, until we do 
the will of God, it becomes doubt to be humble; and 
when we do it, assuredly it will be yet humbler. 



XVII. 



SILENCE AND MEDITATION. 
Psalm lxiii. 0. 

i remember thee upon my bed, and meditate on thee in the 
night-watches. 

The elder Protestant moralists laid great stress, in 
all their teachings, on the duties of self-scrutiny and 
prayer. And though their complaints show that 
there was a frequent neglect of their injunctions, it 
cannot be doubted that, in our forefathers' scheme of 
life, the exercise of lonely thought filled a much larger 
space than it does in ours. It was deemed shameful 
and atheisticaliy to enter the closet for nothing but 
sleep, and quit it only for meals and trade ; passing 
the awfulness of life entirely by, and evading all 
earnest contact with the deep and silent God. A 
sense of guilt attached to those who cast themselves 
from their civil life into their dreams, and back again. 
That the merchant or the statesman should be upon 
his knees, that the general should pass from his 
despatches to his devotions, and turn his eye from 
the hosts of battle to the host of heaven, was not felt 
to be incongruous or absurd. Milton's mind gave 
itself at once to the discord of politics below, and the 
symphonies of seraphim above. Vane mingled with 
the administration of colonies, and accounts of the 



212 



SILEXCE AND MEDITATION. 



navy, hopes of a theocracy, and meditations on the 
millenium; and it was no more natural for Cromwell 
to call his officers to council than to prayer. Nay, 
without going back so far, there are few families of 
any standing, that do not inherit the pious diaries of 
some nearer ancestry, betraying how real and large 
a concern to them were the exercises of the solitary 
soul. 

It cannot be denied that there is a great difference 
now. Not that Christians may not be found in 
many sects, and copiously in some, with whom the 
old devout habit is maintained in all integrity ; of 
whose existence it is a simple and sincere ingredient; 
who still find an open door between heaven and 
earth, and pass in and out with free and earnest 
heart. But these represent the characteristic spirit 
of a former, rather than of the present age. The 
sentiments of our own times everywhere betray the 
growing encroachments of the outward upon the 
inward life. How different is our modern 1 saying 
our prayers ' from those wrestlings of spirit, and 
groans and tears that convulsed the Covenanters of 
old ; nay, how much is there in this, that, unless 
there is a printed page before us, we know not what 
we want, and left to ourselves should scarcely find 
we had a want at all ! Prayer by the printing-press 
is surely a very near approach to piety by machinery. 
The public changes in the faith of churches which 
are conspicuously taking place around us, indicate 
the same loss of depth and earnestness in personal 
religion ; for what do the new doctrines say ? ' I 
cannot stand alone with God, and seek his pity to 
my solitary soul ; I must put myself into the visible 
church, and appropriate a share of his favor to that 



SILENCE AND MEDITATION. 



213 



spiritual corporation; I can find no sanctification by 
direct contact of spirit with spirit, and must get it 
done for me through priests and sacraments.' And 
what is this but an open proclamation that private 
audience with God has become impossible, and he 
can be approached only through an ambassador? 
Everywhere strength seems to have gone out from 
the devotional element of life. Those who display 
most of this element are no longer, like the Puritans, 
the strongest men of their day, most resolute, most 
simple, most powerful in debate, most direct in 
action ; but are felt to be feminine and subtle, 
without manly breadth of natural heart, and firm 
footing upon reality. The moments each man 
spends in it are seldom his truest and most unforced ; 
it is not, as once, the clear, deep eye of his nature 
that he turns to Heaven, but the dead and glassy ; 
and he who is without his sincerity in his closet, and 
with only half of it at church, flings it all into the 
work of civil life. In individual character, and in 
society at large, power seems to have gone over from 
the spiritual to the secular. 

This change is no fit subject for unmixed com- 
plaint ; much less must we desire to terrify men, like 
culprits, into an alarm at their impiety, and an af- 
fected resumption of the ancient discipline. Old 
ways of life are not thrown aside, until they become 
untrue, and when they have become untrue, their 
sanctity is gone; though the usage of churches may 
plead for them, the laws of God are against them. 
Who can recommend prayer to one who has lost the 
heart to pray ? — confession to one who is stricken 
by no penitence ? — the words of trust to one whose 
God has gone into the darkness of Fate ? — self- 



214 



SILENCE AND MEDITATION. 



examination to one who, in too fine a knowledge of 
what passes within, finds no power to do the duty 
without? The state of mind which unfits men for 
the habits of our fathers, may be lower or may be 
higher ; but be it what it may, there is no virtue in 
retaining what has grown false ; let all, in their be- 
lief or unbelief, their clearness or perplexity, ground 
themselves only upon reality, and live out the highest 
conviction not of yesterday but of to-day, and how- 
ever the forms of our being may change, its spirit 
will remain unceasingly devout. If you ask, ' What 
is it that has rendered the lonely piety of our fore- 
fathers less natural and possible to us ? ' I believe 
the reason to be this, — their lot was cast near the 
age of the reformation ; they breathed its spirit and 
lived its life; and as Protestantism was at first a 
simple insurrection against formalism and falsehood, 
and gave to the faith within, the authority which it 
denied to the church without, so did it exclusively 
develop the inward religion of the soul, and put it in 
artificial contrast with outward interests and human 
duties. Installing the private conscience in the place 
of the anointed priest, it gave that conscience much 
of the priestly character, inquisitorial, casuistical, 
vigilant and stern ; and sent a man to his self-exam- 
ination, as before he would have gone to his con- 
fessional, to question himself as the church would 
have questioned him before, only with severity more 
searching, as his consciousness knew better w T hat to 
ask. Hence arose an anxious scrupulosity of mind ; 
a loss of all dependence except on the divine offices 
of the solitary soul ; a feeling of terrible necessity 
for the help and strength of God ; a keen scrutiny 
into all the doublings of the heart, and an apprehen- 



SILENCE AND MEDITATION. 



215 



sion of every sophistry of sin ; passing over at once 
from the gay laxity of the Catholic into a grim and 
solemn earnestness. The change was noble and 
healthy, only, like all reactions, capable of excess. 
Men may learn too much of what goes on within 
them ; their spiritual analysis may be too fine ; a 
morbid self-consciousness may be produced, w T hich in 
giving sensitive knowledge, takes away practical 
power; and he who will microscopically look at the 
ultimate fibres of his life-roots, scrapes away the 
element in which they thrive, and withers them in 
the light by which he sees. We must ever grow 
from darkness and the earth ; enough if the blossom 
and the fruit be worthy of the sunshine and the 
heaven. Our days witness a recoil from the extreme 
inwardness of our fore-father's religion ; human 
affections warm us more ; human duties are nobler 
in our view ; social interests are of deeper moment ; 
and the whole scene of man's visible life, no longer 
the mere vestibule of an invisible futurity, has a 
worth and dignity of its own, which philanthropy 
delights to honor, and only fanaticism can despise. 
For my own part, I think the change a sign of 
nature's restorative power, and see in it the stirrings 
of new health ; even though partially brought about 
by temporary scepticism, I cannot deplore it, for it 
shows that the conscience cannot go on living in a 
pretence, but, in retreating from things of which it 
doubts, gets its foot upon duties which it knows. In 
this are the first beginnings of new religion to replace 
the old ; if the divine earnestness within us only 
shifts and does not die, it matters little what becomes 
of our mere theology ; and deep-hearted practical 
faithfulness is not separable long from true-thoughted 
practical faith. 



216 



SILENCE AND MEDITATION. 



Let us admit, then, that our revolt against the old 
spiritualism has come about in quite a natural way; 
that it was fast going down into mere moral hypo- 
chondria ; and that, to work the cure, it was inevita- 
ble that the ivorld (as divines opprobriously term it), 
i. e. the opportunities of action with a view to tem- 
poral good, whether personal or social, should reassert 
its sway. Like the sick physician, who cannot let 
his pulse alone or cease to speculate on his sensa- 
tions, Christendom, bewildered by its own deep 
knowledge of the human heart, kept too inquiring a 
finger on the throbs of its emotions, and fancied 
many an action of healthy nature into a symptom 
of fatal disease ; we are not to find fault with the 
remedy of Providence, — a turn-out into the open 
air and various industry of life ; a resort to the 
plough, the loom, the ship, and all the arts by which 
it is given to man to make the earth at once his 
subject and his friend. But let us also admit that 
the outward life has for some time past tyrannized 
over us ; extravagantly invading our private habits; 
narrowing our modes of thought and sentiment ; 
benumbing our consciousness of a spiritual nature ; 
and impairing to us the reality of God. Let us own 
that the Divine spirit is gone into distance and 
strangeness from us, and is hard to reach ; that 
solitude brings no unspeakable converse, no ready 
consecration ; that things just next the senses and 
understanding seem nearer to us than those that 
touch the soul ; that the crowd and noise are too 
close and constant on us, confusing our better per- 
ceptions, and leading us always to look round, 
seldom to look up ; that the glare of the lamps has 
destroyed the midnight and put out the stars. 



SILENCE AND MEDITATION, 



217 



Now this despotism of the outward over the in- 
ward life, this suppression of every attribute not 
immediately wanted for business or society, is a 
misfortune which every noble mind will assuredly 
withstand. It is not right to live as if God were 
asleep, and Heaven only a murmur from his dreams. 
It should make some difference to a man, whether 
his Creator be here in the present, or gone off into 
the past; whether he himself dwells in the hollow 
of a living hand, or, with nothing beyond him but 
necessity, struggles for his place in a dead, deserted 
world. And this difference will not be realized, nor 
any lofty truth of character attained, by those who 
disown the claims of lonely thought and silence in 
religion. 

There is an act of the mind, natural to the earnest 
and the wise, impossible only to the sensual and the 
fool, healthful to all who are sincere, which has small 
place in modern usage, and which few can now dis- 
tinguish from vacuity. Those who knew what it 
was, called it meditation. It is not reading, in which 
we apprehend the thoughts of others, and bring them 
to our critical tribunal. It is not study, in which we 
strive to master the known and prevail over it, till it 
lies in order beneath our feet. It is not reasoning, in 
which we seek to push forward the empire of our 
positive conceptions, and by combining what we 
have, reach others that we have not. It is not delib- 
eration, which computes the particular problems of 
action, reckons up the forces that surround our indi- 
vidual lot, and projects accordingly the expedient or 
the right. It is not self-scrutiny, which by itself is 
only shrewdness, or at most science turned within 
instead of without, and analyzing mental feelings 

19 



218 



SILENCE AND MEDITATION. 



instead of physical facts. Its view is not personal 
and particular, but universal and immense, — the 
sweep of the nocturnal telescope over the infinitely 
great, not the insight of the solar microscope into 
the infinitely small. It brings, not an intense self- 
consciousness and spiritual egotism, but almost a 
renunciation of individuality, a mingling with the 
universe, a lapse of our little drop of existence into 
the boundless ocean of being. It does not find for 
us our place in the known world, but loses it for us 
in the unknown. It puts nothing clearly beneath 
our feet, but a vault of awful beauty above our 
head. It gives us no matter for criticism and doubt, 
but everything for wonder and for love. It does 
not suggest indirect demonstration, but furnishes 
immediate perception of things divine, eye to eye 
with the saints, spirit to spirit with God, peace to 
peace with Heaven. In thus being alone with the 
truth of things, and passing from shows and shadows 
into communion with the everlasting One, there is 
nothing at all impossible and out of reach. He is 
not faded or slow to bring his light any more than 
his sunshine, which is bright and swift as ever. He 
was no nearer to Christ on Tabor or in Gethsemane, 
than to us this day and every day. Neither the 
nature he inspires, nor his perennial inspiration, 
grows any older with the lapse of time. Every 
human being that is born is a first man, fresh in 
this creation, and as open to Heaven as if Eden 
were spread round him ; and every blessed kindling 
of faith and new sanctity is a touch of his spirit as 
living, a gift as immediate from his exhaust-less store 
of holy power, as the strength that befriended Christ 
in temptation, and the angel-calm that closed his 



SILENCE AND MEDITATION. 



219 



agony. Is it not promised for ever to the pure in 
heart that they shall see God ? Let any true man 
go into silence ; strip himself of all pretence, and 
selfishness, and sensuality, and sluggishness of soul ; 
lift off thought after thought, passion after passion, 
till he reaches the inmost deep of all ; remember how- 
short a time, and he was not at all ; how short a 
time again, and he will not be here ; open his win- 
dow and look upon the night, how still its breath, 
how solemn its march, how deep its perspective, how 
ancient its forms of light; and think how little he 
knows except the perpetuity of God, and the myste- 
riousness of life ; and it will be strange if he does 
not feel the Eternal Presence as close upon his soul, 
as the breeze upon his brow ; if he does not say, 4 O 
Lord, art thou ever near as this, and have I not 
known thee ? ' — if the true proportions and the 
genuine spirit of life do not open on his heart with 
infinite clearness, and show him the littleness of his 
temptations, and the grandeur of his trust. He is 
ashamed to have found weariness in toil so light, 
and tears where there was no trial to the brave. He 
discovers with astonishment how small the dust that 
has blinded him, and from the height of a quiet and 
holy love, looks down with incredulous sorrow on 
the jealousies, and fears, and irritations, that have 
vexed his life. A mighty wind of Resolution sits in 
strong upon him, and freshens the whole atmosphere 
of his soul ; sweeping down before it the light flakes 
of difficulty, till they vanish like snow upon the sea. 
He is imprisoned no more in a small compartment of 
time, but belongs to an eternity which is now and 
here. The isolation of his separate spirit passes 
away; and with the countless multitude of souls 



220 



SILENCE AND MEDITATION. 



akin to God, he is but as a wave of His unbounded 
deep. He is at one with Heaven, and hath found the 
secret place of the Almighty. 

Silence is in truth the attribute of God ; and those 
who seek him from that side invariably learn, that 
meditation is not the dream, but the reality of life; 
not its illusion, but its truth ; not its weakness, but 
its strength. Such act of the mind is quite needful, 
in order to rectify the estimates of the senses and the 
lower understanding, to shake off the drowsy order 
of perceptions, in which, with the eyes of the soul 
half closed, we are apt to doze away existence here. 
Neglecting it now, we shall wake into it hereafter, 
and find that we have been walking in our sleep. 
It is necessary even to preserve the truthfulness of 
our practical life. It is always the tendency of 
action to fall into routine and become mechanical ; 
to become less and less dependent on the living 
forces of the Will, and to continue itself by mere 
momentum in the direction it has once assumed. 
When conscience and not passion presides over life, 
this tendency is not abated but confirmed ; for con- 
science is essentially systematic, subdues everything 
to a fixed order, and then is troubled or content, ac- 
cording as this is violated or observed. But the inner 
spirit of the mind, which all outward action should 
express, is not naturally thus inflexible ; it drifts 
away from its old anchorages, and gets afloat upon 
new tides of thought ; as experience deepens, exist- 
ence ceases to be the same, and the proportions in 
which things lie within our affections are materially 
changed; as the ascent of time is made, life is seen 
from a higher point, and fresh fields of truth and duty 
spread before our view. Habit being conservative, 



SILENCE AND MEDITATION. 



221 



faith and feeling being progressive, unless their mu- 
tual relation be constantly re-adjusted by meditation, 
they will cease to correspond, and become miserably 
divergent ; our action will not be true, our thought 
will not be real; both will be weak and dead ; both 
distrustful as a culprit'; both relying on hollow credit, 
and empty of solid wealth ; and our whole life, 
begun perhaps in the order of conscience, and mov- 
ing on externally the same, may become a semblance 
and a cheat. Bare moral principle, unless holding of 
something more divine, affords but an unsafe tenure 
of the wisdom and the strength of life. 

And even when the right is clearly seen, meditation 
is needed to collect our powers to do it. It is the 
great storehouse of our spiritual dynamics, where 
divine energies lie hid for any enterprise, and the 
hero is strengthened for his field. All great things 
are born of silence. The fury indeed of destructive 
passion may start up in the hot conflict of life, and 
go forth with tumultuous desolation ; but all bene- 
ficent and creative power gathers itself together in 
silence, ere it issues out in might. Force, itself, 
indeed, is naturally silent, and makes itself heard, if 
at all, when it strikes upon obstructions, to bear them 
away as it returns to equilibrium again. The very 
hurricane that roars over land and ocean, flits noise- 
lessly through spaces where nothing meets it. The 
blessed sunshine says nothing, as it warms the vernal 
earth, tempts out the tender grass, and decks the field 
and forest in their glory. Silence came before crea- 
tion, and the heavens were spread without a word. 
Christ was born at dead of night ; and though there 
has been no power like his, ' he did not strive nor cry, 
neither was his voice heard in the streets.' Nowhere 
10* 



222 



SILENCE AND MEDITATION. 



can you find any beautiful work, any noble design, 
any durable endeavor, that was not matured in long 
and patient silence, ere it spake out in its accomplish- 
ment. There it is that we accumulate the inward 
power which we distribute and spend in action ; put 
the smallest duty before us in dignified and holy as- 
pects ; and reduce the severest hardships beneath the 
foot of our self-denial. There it is that the soul, en- 
larging all its dimensions at once, acquires a greater 
and more vigorous being, and gathers up its collec- 
tive forces to bear down upon the piece-meal difficul- 
ties of life, and scatter them to dust. There alone 
can we enter into that spirit of self-abandonment, by 
which we take up the cross of duty, however heavy, 
with feet however worn and bleeding they may be. 
And thither shall we return again, not only into 
higher peace and more triumphant power, when 
the labor is over and the victory won, and we are 
called by death into God's loftiest watch-tower of 
Contemplation. 



XVIII. 



WINTER WORSHIP. 
John v. 13. 

and he that was healed wist not who it was. 

If the first power of Christianity was embodied in 
miracle, it was in miracle so distinctly expressive of 
its spirit, and so analogous to its natural agency in 
the world, as to invite rather than repel our imitation. 
Whatever be meant by the two great preternatural 
endowments entrusted to its earliest missionaries, — 
the gift of tongues and the gift of healing, — they 
represent clearly enough the two grand functions of 
our religion, — to bear persuasion to the minds, and 
bring mercy to the physical ills, of men. On that 
summer-morning in Jerusalem, when the men of 
Galilee stood forth within the temple-courts to preach 
the first glad tidings to the strangers of Parthia, and 
Greece, and Rome, and with their speech reached 
the minds of that multitude of many tongues, what 
better symbol could there be of that religion, whose 
spirit is intelligible to all, because it addresses itself 
to the universal human heart, and speaks, not the 
artificial jargon of sects and nations, but the natural 
language of the affections, which are immortal. And 
when the crowd of weary sufferers thronged around 
the Apostle's steps in the city, the blind supporting 
the lame, and the lame eyes to the blind ; or when 



224 



WINTER WORSHIP. 



the solitary leper saw them in the field, and made his 
gesture of entreaty from afar, and all were healed, 
how better could be represented the character of that 
faith which has never set eyes on pain without yield- 
ing it a tear ; which in proportion as it has been 
cordially embraced, has sickened the heart of scenes 
of suffering and blood, and lessened, age after age, the 
stripes wherewith humanity is stricken. We neither 
claim nor ask for the cloven tongues of a divine per- 
suasion ; we boast not of any arm of miracle which 
we can lay bare in conflict with disease and sorrow ; 
but in the spirit of these acts of Providence we may 
participate. While fanatics vainly pretend to repeat 
their marvellousness, we may chose the better part, 
and copy their beneficence. The world needs the 
preachers of wonders, less than the apostles of 
charity. 

And amid all the splendors of miracle, nothing 
could be more unostentatious than the diffusion of 
Christ's mercy by its missionaries in the days of old. 
Beginning at the provinces of Palestine, it passed, 
from village to village of the interior, from city to 
city of the vast empire's various coast; along the 
shores of Asia, beneath the citadels of Greece, to the 
world's great palace on the Tiber, it stole along, fleet 
and silent as the wind that bloweth where it listeth, 
sweeping through every foul recess, and leaving 
health where it found pestilence. Our imagination, 
corrupted by the vanity of history, dwells perhaps 
too much on the more brilliant positions and marked 
triumphs of the ancient gospel. We follow Paul 
through his vicissitudes, and feel an idle pride in his 
most conspicuous adventures; and when he stretches 
forth the hand and speaks before king Agrippa; when 



WINTER WORSHIP. 



225 



idolaters mistake the bearer of a godlike message for 
a god, and bow before him as to Mercury ; when in 
Ephesus he becomes the rival of Diana, and ruins the 
craftsmen of silver shrines; when philosophy listens 
to him on Areopagus, and the Furies still slumber 
within hearing in their grove, — we vainly think that 
he derives his greatest dignity from the scenes in the 
midst of which he stands, a contrast and a stranger. 
As we would deserve the Christian name, let us look 
more deeply into his mission, and adopt more fully 
the spirit of his mind. Watch him even in Rome, 
where he dwelt, though a prisoner, in his own hired 
house ; and where shall we seek for him in that daz- 
zling metropolis ? He was not one to pass through its 
scenes of magnificence with stupid and fanatic in- 
difference, to find himself surrounded by the monu- 
ments of ancient freedom, and listen for the first time 
to the very language of the world's conquerors, with- 
out catching the inspiration of history, feeling the 
solemn shadow of the past fall upon him. I do not 
say that he never paused beneath the senate-house to 
think of the voices that had been heard within its 
walls ; or climbed the capitol, once the palace of the 
republic, now its shrine ; or started at the fasces, stern 
emblem of a justice now no more ; or went without 
excitement into the imperial presence through the 
very gardens where his own blood shall hereafter be 
shed in merriment. But his daily walks passed all 
these splendors by; they dived into the lanes and 
suburbs on which no glory of history is shed, and 
which made Rome the sink and curse, while it was 
the ruler of the nations; they found the haunts of the 
scorned Hebrew ; they startled the degraded revels of 
the slave ; they sought out the poor foreigner, attract- 



226 



WINTER "WORSHIP 



ed by the city's wealth, and perishing amid its deso- 
lation; they crept to the pallet on which fever and 
poverty were stretched, tendering the hand of restora- 
tion, and whispering the lessons of peace. This was 
his noblest dignity ; not that he publicly pleaded be- 
fore princes, but that he secretly solaced the outcast 
and the friendless ; not that he paced the forum, but 
that he lingered in the dens of wretchedness, and re- 
freshed the hardened heart with gentle sympathies, 
and linked the alien with the fraternity of men, and 
dropped upon the darkest lot the spirit of Providence 
and of hope. And what is true of this great apostle, 
is true of the religion which he spread, and which we 
profess. Its true dignity is, that unseen it has ever 
gone about doing good. Link after link has it struck 
from the chain of every human thraldom ; error after 
error has it banished ; pain after pain has it driven 
from body or from mind; and so silently has the bless- 
ing come, that (like the lame whom Peter made to 
walk) 'he that was healed wist not who it was.' 

It can never be unseasonable for those that bear 
the name of Christ to imitate his spirit, and to 
address themselves to the great mission which Provi- 
dence has assigned to their religion (that is, to them- 
selves), as the antagonist power to those human 
sufferings, which may be lightened at least, if not 
remedied. But this period of the year* brings with 
it a distinct and peculiar call to remember with a 
thought of mercy the several ills that flesh is heir to. 
Every season has its appropriate worship, and de- 
mands an appropriate recognition; for each presents 
in some peculiar form the physical activity of nature, 

* This discourse was preached at the end of November. 



"WINTER WORSHIP. 



227 



which is, in fact, the spiritual energy of God. If, in 
the picturesque spirit of ancient times, we had our 
annual festivals for remembering the several aspects of 
our lot, and bringing successively before the eye the 
many-colored phases of human existence, we should 
cast lots among the days of spring for an anniversary 
of life and health, when earth is unburthening her 
mighty heart to God, and framing from a thousand 
new-born melodies an anthem of brilliant praise. 
For the celebration of disease and death we should 
resort to the days of the declining year; and instead 
of leaping on the green sod and pouring forth the 
hymn of joy, we should kneel upon the rotting leaves 
and pray. However constant the visitations of sick- 
ness and bereavement, the fall of the year is most 
thickly strewn with the fall of human life. Every- 
where the spirit of some sad power seems to direct 
the time ; it hides from us the blue heavens ; it makes 
the green wave turbid ; it walks through the fields, 
and lays the damp, ungathered harvest low ; it cries 
out in the night-wind and the shrill hail ; it steals the 
summer bloom from the infant cheek; it makes old 
age shiver to the heart ; it goes to the churchyard, and 
chooses many a grave ; it flies to the bell and enjoins 
it when to toll. It is God that goes his yearly round; 
and gathers up the appointed lives ; and, even where 
the hour is not come, engraves by pain and poverty 
many a sharp and solemn lesson on the heart. 

How, then, shall we render the fitting worship of 
the season? We do so, when we think of these 
things in the spirit of religion ; when we regard them 
in their relation to the great "Will which produces 
them ; when, instead of meeting them in the spirit of 
recklessness, or viewing in them the triumph of dis- 



228 



WINTER WORSHIP. 



order, or shrinking from them in imbecile fear, we 
recognize their position in a sympathy of universal 
Providence, various in its means, but paternal in its 
spirit, and beneficent in its ends ; when ' none of these 
things move us,' except to a more reverential sense of 
mystery, and a serener depth of trust. In a season 
of mortality, it is surely impossible to forget the re- 
lations of other scenes to this; that departure from 
this life is birth into another ; that the immortal rises 
where the mortal falls; that the farewell in the vale 
below is followed by greetings on the hills above; so 
that if sympathy with mourners here permit, the sor- 
rows of the bereaved on earth are the festival of the 
redeemed in heaven. 

We render the appropriate worship of the season, 
when we think of the painful passages of human life, 
not merely as proceeding from God, but as incident 
to our own lot; not merely in the spirit of religion, 
but in that of self -application. It is difficult for the 
living and the vigorous to realize the idea of sickness 
and of death ; and though within a few paces of our 
daily walks there are beings that lie in the last 
struggle, and some sufferer's moan escapes with every 
breath that flies, yet whenever pain fairly seizes our 
persons in his grasp, or enters and usurps our homes, 
we start as if he were a stranger. And perhaps it 
will be asked, ' Why should it be otherwise ? Why 
forestal the inevitable day, and let the damp cloud of 
expectation fall on the illumined passages of life ? ' 
I grant that to remember the conditions of our exist- 
ence with such result as this, to think of them in an 
abject and melancholy spirit, is no act of wisdom or 
of duty. I know of no obligation to live with an 
imagination ever haunted by mortality; to deem 



WINTER WORSHIP. 



229 



every enjoyment dangerous, lest it cheat the heart 
into a happy repose upon the present, and every 
pursuit a snare, which fairly embarks the affections 
upon this world; to consider all things here devoid of 
any good purpose, except to tempt us. The theory 
which crowds this life with trials and the other 
with rewards, which brightens the future only by 
blackening the present, which supposes that the only 
proper office of our residence here is to keep up one 
prolonged meditation on the hereafter, is a mere 
burlesque of nature and the gospel. Futurity is not 
to mar, but to mend our activity ; and earth is not 
given that we may win the reversion of heaven, so 
much as heaven revealed to ennoble our tenure of 
earth. I know of no peculiar preparation for immor- 
tality beyond the faithful performance of the best 
functions of mortal life ; and if it were not that these 
will be more wisely discharged, and the attendant 
blessing more truly felt, by those who remember 
the sadder conditions of our lot than by those who 
forget them, there would be no reason why they 
should ever appear before the thoughts. But they 
are facts, solemn and inevitable facts, which come 
with least crushing power on those who see them 
from afar, and become reconciled to them, and even 
fill them by forethought with peaceful suggestion. 
The sense of their possibility breaks through the 
superficial crust of life, and stirs up the deeper affec- 
tions of our nature. It refines the sacredness of 
every human tie; it dignifies the claims of duty; it 
freshens the emotions of conscience ; it gives prompti- 
tude to the efforts of sympathy; and elevates the 
whole attitude of life. 

But, above all, we pay the fitting worship of the 
20 



230 



WINTER WORSHIP. 



season, when we greet its peculiar ills in the spirit of 
humanity; when we think of them not simply as they 
come from God, and may come to ourselves, but as 
they actually do befall our neighbors and fellow-men. 
It were selfish to gather round our firesides, and cir- 
culate the laugh of cheerfulness and health, without 
a thought or deed of pity for the poor sufferers that 
struggle with the winter storms of nature or of life. 
Who can help looking at this season with a more 
considerate and reverential eye upon the old man, to 
think, where he may be ? Year after year he has 
been shaken by the December winds, but not yet 
shaken to his fall ; deeper and deeper the returning 
frost has crept into his nature, — and will it reach the 
life-stream now? You watch him, as you would 
the last pendulous leaf of the forest, still held by 
some capricious fibre, that refuses perhaps to part 
with it to the storm, and then drops it slowly through 
the still air. You gaze at him as he stands before 
you, and wonder that you can ever do so without 
awe; for the visible margin of existence crumbles 
beneath him, and he slips into the unfathomable. 
And as the tempest wakes us on our pillow, it is but 
common justice to our human heart, to send out a 
thought over the cold and vexed sea in search of the 
poor mariner that buffets with the night, or perhaps 
sinks in that most lonely of deaths, between the black 
heavens that pelt him from above and the insatiable 
waste that swallows him below. Nor will generous 
and faithful souls forget the dingy cellar or the 
crowded hovel, where in a neighboring street the 
fevered sufferer lies, and the ravings of delirium and 
the sports of children are heard together, or life is 
ebbing away in consumption, hurried to its close by 



WIN TEE, WORSHIP. 



231 



the chill breath of poverty and winter. O could we 
but see the dread gripe of want and disease upon 
hundreds of this community at this moment, and 
hear the cries of hungry children and the moan of 
untended sickness, the only difficulty would be, not 
to stimulate our generosity to do enough, but to per- 
suade it to work out its good with patience and with 
wisdom! 

And here indeed is a difficulty, which every con- 
siderate mind will feel to be grave, and even terrible. 
The multitude of miseries spread around us make 
humanity easy, — a wise direction of its impulses, 
most difficult; the very spectacle which gives to 
benevolence its intensity, throws it also into despair. 
The perplexity arises partly from the state of society 
in which we live ; from relations among its several 
classes altogether new, and rendering the ancient and 
traditional methods of doing good in a great degree 
in applicable. A slave-owning or feudal community, 
by killing out from the great mass of men everything 
above the rank of hunger, reduces the office of com- 
passion within a very narrow compass; and the dish 
from the rich man's table, or the garment from his 
wardrobe, sent as to the domestic animals of his estate, 
to stop their cries and soothe them to sleep, are the only 
boons that are required, or possibly that can be given 
without peril of social revolution. Happily, yet not 
without much unhappiness too, such revolution is 
now effected or in progress ; greatly through the in- 
fluence of that Christianity, which pronounces all to 
be children of One who 'is no respecter of persons;' 
and assures us that whenever we say, 'Be thou 
warmed and filled,' it is no other than ' a brother or 
sister' that comes before us 'naked and destitute 



232 



WINTER WORSHIP. 



of daily food.' Our current notions of benevolence 
have descended to us from the recent times of feudal- 
ism ; yet we are conscious that they do not come up 
to the higher demands which have arisen, or adapt 
themselves to the new intellectual and moral wants 
comprised in any Christian estimate of the poor of 
this world. The ease of ancient condescension is 
gone ; the graceful recognition of human brotherhood 
is not attained. To aim at making men like our- 
selves into creatures with enough to eat, — though a 
thing unrealized as yet, — is felt to be insufficient; 
and how to raise them into the likeness of the chil- 
dren of God we cannot tell, — the very notion receiv- 
ing at present but a timid acknowledgment. This, 
however, if we are in earnest, is but a temporary 
difficulty, attending on a state of hesitancy and tran- 
sition. Let the mind fairly emancipate itself from 
that debasing valuation of a human being which the 
mere sentiments of property would dictate ; trust 
itself, with high faith, to the equalizing spirit of 
Christian piety and hope ; and in paying to all the 
reverence due to an immortal, it will attain to the 
freedom and power of a divine love, — it will speak 
to sorrow with the voice of another Christ, and re- 
store his holiest miracles of mercy. Who can doubt, 
that were his spirit here, the work of good need not 
despair ? 

But for want of this spirit in perpetuity, another 
obstacle obstructs the course of bewildered charity. 
We form our good intentions too late ; and while 
benevolence, to be successful, must work in the way 
of prevention and anticipation, — at the very least 
putting resolutely down each confused and hurtful 
thing as it appears, — men rarely bestir themselves 



WINTER WORSHIP. 



233 



till evils get ahead, and by no effort can well be over- 
taken. The physical, moral, and religious condition 
of the poor, which in our days begin to excite so 
much attention, should have been studied thus half 
a century ago ; easy in comparison had it then been 
to prevent the ills which now we know not how to 
cure. We permit a generation to grow up neglected, 
with habits a grade below their fathers'; and then 
consider how they may be reclaimed. We suffer a 
new manufacture to start into existence, and seize, 
with the hands of a needy giant, on infant labor; 
and when it has appropriated a generation to itself, 
and boldly insists on its prescriptive right to be fed 
for ever from the same life-blood of our humanity, 
we look round on the degenerate bodies and stunted 
minds of an enormous population, and begin to cry 
out for an efficient public education, against which 
the immediate physical interests of poor as well as 
rich are now combined. The Providence of God is 
retributory ; and too often it happens that the sinful 
negligence of one age cannot be repaired by the 
penitent benevolence of many. The unpaid debt 
accumulates its interest, till discharge becomes im- 
possible. Misery grows impatient and clamorous ; 
and repays at length in fury the injuries inflicted by 
ancient wantonness and neglect. Neither in com- 
munities, nor in individuals, does God give encour- 
agement to death-bed repentance ; and societies that 
trust to it shall find themselves, after short delay, 
under the lash of demons, and near the seat of Hell. 
Let them be timely wise, and maintain the vigils of 
benevolence, while the accepted hour remains. 

Amid all controversies respecting the quarter from 
which the assault on the evils of indigence is best 
20* 



234 



WINTER "WORSHIP. 



commenced, whether the physical wants should be 
remedied through the moral, or the moral through 
the physical, whether most is to be hoped for from 
legislative measures, or from individual efforts, one 
principle may be regarded as certain, and, consider- 
ing the tendencies of our age, not unseasonable. 
You cannot mechanize benevolence ; you cannot 
put Christian love into an act of parliament, or a 
subscription -list ; and however necessary may be the 
remedial action of laws and institutions, on account 
of the comprehensive scale of then operation, the 
ties between man and man can be drawn closer only 
by personal agency. Not one new sympathy can 
arise but by the contact between mind and mind. 
In the spiritual world life is born only of life ; nor 
is any abrogation possible of that law of God which 
requires that we seek whatever we would save. The 
good comfort which with willing soul we tender to 
each other is of all things most precious to the heart. 
As the blow of calamity falls with threefold weight 
when it descends from the injustice of men, so the 
deliverance brought by their pity and affection is a 
blessing infinitely multiplied. The one poisons and 
prevents our submission, as to a will of God ; the 
other sweetens and elevates our gratitude to him. 
The one cancels, the other creates, what is most 
divine in the dispensation. Only so far as there is 
a ' charity' that 'never faileth' from the souls of men, 
can they live in communion together on this earth ; 
and from Christendom every ' faith ' shall be cast out 
as a dead heathenism, except such as ' worketh by 
love.' 



XIX. 



THE GREAT YEAR OF PROVIDENCE. 
2 Peter hi. 4. 

where is the promise of his coming? for, since the fathers 
fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the be- 
ginning of the creation. 

Christ quitted the world in benediction, and left 
upon it a legacy of inextinguishable hope. The first 
manifestation of the hopeful spirit of his religion was 
in the expectation, confidently held by the Apostles 
and their followers, that within £ that generation ' he 
would return from Heaven in triumph, gather to- 
gether a faithful community, exterminate the ills of 
human life, and become monarch over a renovated 
and immortal world. Sufferers of every class (and 
the church had mercy for them all) laid this hope to 
heart, and stood silent beneath scorn and persecution, 
believing that the lashes of oppression were num- 
bered now. As the years passed on, and the outer 
limits of the generation were approached, the flush 
of expectation became more intense. One after 
another the Apostles dropped off, without witnessing 
the desire of their eyes ; till at last the protracted 
life of John became the solitary and fragile thread 
on which this splendid anticipation hung. He, too, 
died, and Jesus had not returned; and the church, 
unwilling to confess its disappointment, extended the 



236 



THE GREAT YEAR OF PROVIDENCE. 



term of hope by a liberal construction of the promise. 
Here and there among the communities of disciples 
there lingered a few aged men whose life reached 
back to the years of Christ's ministry ; and till they 
were gone, it was not too late for the Son of Man 
to come. Expectation became more anxious and 
feverish every year ; passing events were perverted 
into auguries of its impending realization ; the rout 
of an army, the incursion of a new invader, the rumor 
of an earthquake, the blaze of meteor by night, or a 
stroke of lightning upon a Pagan shrine, was caught 
at with breathless eagerness, and watched as a herald 
to the last act of human things. But as storm after 
storm passed off and brought no change ; as life 
after life disappeared, and even rumor could find no- 
where a surviving representative of Christ's genera- 
tion, hope fainted into doubt; and despair broke 
loose and cried, ' Where is the promise of his coming? 
for since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as 
they were from the beginning of the creation.' No 
brilliant exultation longer cheered the woes of the 
church and of the world; they fell back again with 
their dull weight upon the heart. The Christian 
mother wept now for her martyred son, whom, in the 
thought of instant restoration, she had forgot to 
mourn ; the despised teacher began to cower before 
the Heathen's or the Hebrew's scorn, which he knew 
no longer how to answer ; and the irons of the Chris- 
tian field-slave, to which for years his faith had given 
a farewell look each night before he slept, grew heavy 
on his limbs again. 

Almost eighteen hundred years separate us from 
the disappointment of this singular expectation ; and 
the calmness with which we can look back on a 



THE GREAT YEAH OE PEOVIDENCE. 



237 



scene so distant, enables us to draw from it a sacred 
lesson of Providence. Well might God rebuke and 
disappoint this affectionate but erring hope ; for what 
did it assume ? That a few years' preaching of a 
pure religion, and the forcible enthronement upon 
earth of one who had lived in Heaven, were all that 
was necessary for perfecting the world, for driving 
sin and sorrow from the hearts and homes of men, 
and giving life its final sanctity. How imperfect 
was the estimate of this regenerative work, which 
could assign it to instruments so inadequate, and a 
process so brief! God has taught us now, that a 
moral change so various and stupendous, implying 
the civilization of barbarism, the illumination of the 
ignorant, the rescue of the oppressed, the pacification 
of nations, the multiplication of Christ's own spirit 
of humanity over the globe, is not to be wrought in 
an hour by Omnipotence itself; is beyond the reach 
of any mechanical scheme of rule, though conducted 
by beings of another world ; and must wait on the 
silent operation of those spiritual laws of the human 
mind, which neither the individual nor the race can 
be permitted to outstrip. We look back over the 
centuries by which we have retired from the foun- 
tains of our faith, and learn how solemn is the task 
of Providence on earth ; for he labors at it still ; and 
though its progress has been visible to this hour, it 
seems but starting on its cycle yet. 

Who will not confess a strong sympathy with the 
early Christian's delight, in anticipating certain great 
and divine revolutions within their own generation? 
That human life is too short to witness the fruits 
of its own efforts ; that it scatters in seed-time, but 
may not put the sickle to its own harvest ; that its 



238 THE GREAT YEAH OF PEOYIDEXCE. 



whole career from infancy to age scarce measures a 
solitary step in the march of humanity, has always 
been felt To be an arrangement hard to bear. And 
there is a peculiar fascination in the thought of per- 
sonally experiencing the realization of one's social 
dreams, of quickening a too tardy Providence to the 
pace of our fleeting years, and finding our race of 
man give promise of perfection, during our mortal 
instead of our immortal lives. It is the severest and 
subljmest duty of philanthropy to toil in faith and 
die in tears ; to grapple with ills that must survive it, 
and may destroy; to remonstrate with oppression, 
and only see its gripe tightened on its victim in 
revenge. The mistake of the early church is not 
theirs alone ; it is a human, rather than a theological 
error. All men have the prime element of such a 
superstition in themselves; an impatience at the slow 
step of advancement, an eagerness for some visible 
and palpable progress in everything which is thought 
capable of indefinite improvement. Such delusion, 
is the only way in which the human soul can get into 
God's everlasting now.' Yet, while really springing 
from a noble faith, it produces, in its reaction, many 
an ignoble doubt. This disposition looks, for ex- 
example, at the individual mind; and seeing it become 
stationary, the dull slave of habit, declares that it 
cannot, be immortal. Or -it contemplates the general 
community of men: and imagining it little superior 
to some former condition of the world, denies it the 
hope of unlimited amelioration. This spirit of de- 
spondency is especially liable to visit us, when we 
stand at one of the pauses of our time, — at the end 
of a season, of a year, of a life, — of any unit that has 
had a predecessor, and will have a successor, just like 



THE GSEAT YEA.B. OF PROVIDENCE. 



239 



itself: still more perhaps, when we review the pro- 
gress (ever small compared with our desires) of some 
benevolent work,* to which, from its magnitude and 
character, we can see no definite determination. The 
retrospect of a few years often seems to exhibit to us 
a sameness the most depressing; to show us how 
little we have done; to persuade us that, — as if in 
rebuke of our hopes, — 'all things continue as they 
were,' and no advent of a better life is heralded as yet. 
The same evils which met our eye and our pity of old, 
encounter us this day; and if in any instances they 
have been cancelled, others, not less frightful, seem 
ever ready to rush up into their place ; so that, in 
turning to the future, no visible end appears to the 
saddening task of Christian mercy. Under the in- 
fluence of this thought, the mind is haunted and 
harassed by the image of all things circulating ; 
whirling in mysterious self-repetition; looking in 
upon us with the fixed full eye of an ancient fatal- 
ism. And we are deluded into the fear that nothing 
is ever to be better ; that our faith in the progress of 
our religion and our kind must be dragged into the 
vortex of a wearisome periodicity, and expire in the 
exclamation, 'Where is the promise of his coming? 
for since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as 
they were from the beginning of the creation.' 

This distressing impression might be relieved, if we 
could only discriminate, by any rule, between those 
series of events which are periodical, and those which 
are eternal; — between those changes in the moral 
world which visibly complete themselves, and those 

*This Discourse was preached in behalf of the Loudon Domestic 
Mission, April, 1841. 



240 



THE GREAT YEAH OF PROVIDENCE. 



which at least may be interminable. Change of some 
kind is the law of the universe; everything which 
God does is progressive; and the present question is, 
whether any of his progressions having reference to 
human beings appear to run on into infinitude? 

Now in seeking for an answer to this question, we 
are encountered by an apparent law of the organized, 
or at all events of the sentient creation, of a truly re- 
markable character; — a law which, though discern- 
ible only in fragments and interrupted by seeming 
exceptions, holds with sufficient consistency to dis- 
close the general method of nature; — viz. that in 
proportion to the excellence and dignity of any form 
of existence, is it long in coming to maturity ; that 
the cycles of things are great, in proportion to their 
worth. It is needless to say that there is no other 
criterion of the worth of a being than the magnitude 
of its capacities, and the number of its functions. 

In glancing our eye upon the chain of animal 
races, however difficult it may be to arrange them 
symmetrically in an ascending series, the outlines of 
this law are surely sufficiently obvious. The crea- 
tures which, by universal consent, would be placed at 
the lower end of the scale, seem to come into life 
perfect at once, or if they grow, to grow only in 
quantity ; as if of an existence so inferior no part 
could be spared as preface to the rest. The perfect 
formation of creatures of a superior order divides 
itself into several distinguishable stages ; and the 
greater the number of faculties and instincts, the 
longer is the period set apart for the process of de- 
velopment. The lion has a longer infancy than the 
sheep, and the sagacious elephant than either. The 
human being, lord of this lower world, is conducted 



THE GREAT YEAR OP PROVIDENCE. 



241 



to this supremacy though a yet more protracted 
ascent ; none of the creatures that he rules, have an 
infancy so helpless or so lasting ; none furnish them- 
selves so slowly with the knowledge needful for self- 
subsistence ; — as if to him time were no object, and 
no elaboration of growth were too great for his 
futurity. 

Compare also the different faculties and feelings of 
the individual human mind. You find them appear 
in the order of their excellence ; the noblest approach- 
ing their maturity the last. Sensation, which belongs 
to man in common with all other sentient beings, is 
the endowment of his earliest days. Memory, which 
simply prevents experience from perishing, which fur- 
nishes language to the lips, and preserves the ma- 
terials of the past for future treatment by the mind, 
ripens next. The understanding, which makes in- 
cursions and wins trophies in the field of abstract 
truth, which devises measures for the dimensions of 
space and the successions of time, and the great phys- 
ical movements that circulate within them, is of later 
origin ; while the great inventive power which distin- 
guishes all genius, which seems to sympathize with 
the devising spirit of the Artificer of things, and 
apprehend by natural affinity the most subtle rela- 
tions he has established, and anticipate by mysterious 
intimacy the future secrets of nature, and from old 
and gross ingredients create the useful, the beautiful, 
the true, is the last as it is the rarest and most glo- 
rious of intellectual gifts. And the moral powers, — 
so far as they can be regarded separately from these, 
— are seen and felt expanding later still. The true 
appreciation of action and character, the faithful and 
impartial love of whatever things are pure and good, 
21 



242 



THE GEEAT YEAE OE EEOYIDENCE. 



the correct and profound estimate of life, the seren- 
est spirit of duty and of faith, are scarcely found till 
most of the lessons of our mortal state have been 
read, and the soul has caught some snatches of inspi- 
ration from the 1 still sad music of humanity.' We 
may even say, that perhaps all our faculties do not 
develop themselves here ; and whole classes of emo 
tions and conceptions may wait to be born beneath 
other influences. Certain at least it is, that one who 
dies in infancy, can have little idea of anything be- 
yond sensation ; that one who falls in childhood can- 
not know the toils and triumphs of the pure reason ; 
that one who dies in youth has not yet learned the 
sense of power which belongs to the practised exei> 
cise of creative thought, and the sacred peace of dis- 
interested duty long tried in trembling and in tears. 
Certain too it is, that to the open mind, fresh gleam- 
ings enter to the last ; strange stirrings of diviner 
sympathies ; waves of thin transparent light flitting 
through the spaces of the aged mind, like the Aurora 
of the North across the wintry sky. Even when 
{ maturity ' has been passed, then, we may die per- 
adventure, ignorant of the secret fountains of illumi- 
nation that may be sequestered in the recesses of 
our nature ; and when we depart at threescore years 
and ten, our experience may be as truly imperfect, — 
as much a mere fragment, — as when we lapse in a 
mortality called falsely ' premature.' 

From the individual mind, turn to the successive 
developments of society at large ; and the same law 
is perceptible still ; that the superior attributes are of 
the longest growth. The most rapid of social 
changes is found in the progress of material civili- 
zation ; and certainly it is the least dignified element 



THE- GREAT YEAR OF PROVIDENCE. 243 

in the general advancement, though essential to the 
rest. Of the rapidity with which a new art may be 
perfected, new channels of commerce filled, a new 
manufacture start into gigantic existence, no age or 
country affords more striking instances than our own. 
Let gain supply the adequate motive ; and a few 
years suffice to reclaim the wilderness, and make the 
harvest wave where before the forest rose ; or to cover 
the soil with cities, busy with congregated labor ; or 
to enliven the sea with traffic, where none had dis- 
turbed its solitudes before. How much longer does 
it require to penetrate the mass of a community 
with knowledge ; to fill a land with intelligence than 
to throng it with life ! Even in the long lives of 
nations, few have arrived at that season, when the 
demand for general instruction naturally appears, 
and the truth goes forth, that the people are not a 
herd of mere animals or instruments of mere wealth, 
but beings of rational nature, who have a right to 
their powers of thought; and even where this de- 
mand has arisen, scarce a people yet have lived long 
enough to answer it. The morality of a community 
cannot be matured till its intelligence is unfolded ; 
in societies, as in individuals, character cannot set, 
till reason has blossomed. The pure tastes of virtue 
cannot be looked for in those who have never been 
led beyond their senses ; nor even a wise self-interest 
be expected, where no habits of foresight have been 
acquired, and the intellect has not been taught to re- 
spect the future. I do not even suppose that the 
moral amelioration of a country immediately follows 
on £ the diffusion of knowledge.' On the spread of 
education it may ; but it must be an education which 
comprises a principle of sympathy as well as of in- 



244 



THE GEEAT YEAE OE EEOYIDEXCE. 



struction ; which has a discipline for the heart as well 
as for the understanding ; which remembers the com- 
posite structure of our nature, and applies knowledge 
to no more than its proper office of enlightening the 
reason, and summons up feelings of right as the fit 
antagonists to passions that tend to wrong. But 
slower still than this is the religious civilization of a 
country ; so that the history of a religion is usually 
a much longer and vaster one than the history of any 
people ; a faith embracing many nations, but no 
nation many faiths. The most sacred ideas attach 
themselves with the greatest tenacity to the mind ; 
entwine themselves with the principles of action and 
forms of the affections ; and being most distrustful of 
change, are most tardy of improvement. The history 
of the past confirms these positions. Those coun- 
tries whose progress has been the noblest and most 
durable, have attained their eminence by slow and 
imperceptible steps. And on the other hand, the 
oriental tribes that have rushed into sudden splendor, 
have either stopped with the material or at best the 
intellectual form of greatness, without rising into the 
moral and spiritual ; or else, their religion, resting on 
no adequate substrata of the lower ingredients of 
civilization, wanted an element of stability ; mani- 
festing the nomadic strength for conquest, and weak- 
ness for repose ; and becoming enervated by the arts 
and opulence and science which it first called into 
existence, and then could not command. 

Wherever we look, then, — to the chain of animal 
existence, to the faculties of the individual mind, or 
the stages of collective society, — we discover distinct 
traces of the same general law ; that in proportion to 
the excellence of any form of being, is its progress 



THE GREAT YEAR OF PROVIDENCE. 245 

tardy and its cycle vast. Contract the limits of any 
nature, and its changes become quick and visible ; 
enlarge them, and its vibrations become slow and 
majestic. On the surface of a pool, the wind raises 
rapid billows that would agitate an insect ; on the 
ocean, mighty oscillations that give a frigate time to 
think. ' Like tide there is in the affairs of men ; ' 
and if we think nobly of the great element on which 
it rides, if we take humanity to be no foul and shal- 
low marsh, but a boundless and unfathomable deep, 
we shall not marvel that our little life scarce feels its 
deliberate and solemn sweep. Why, even in physical 
nature, the more complex and extensive any system 
of bodies is, the longer is the period of its revolution, 
and the less perceptible its velocity as a whole. Our 
single earth, revolving round the sun, soon comes to 
the point from which it started ; add the moon to it, 
and the three orbs demand a greatly increased dura- 
tion to return to the same relative position ; collect 
the planets into a group, and their cycles of return, 
when every perturbation shall have had its revolution, 
and they shall look at each other as they did at first, 
becomes immense, and, in our poor conceptions, al- 
most coincides with eternity itself ; and the solar 
system, as a whole, is travelling on all the while, 
astronomers assure us, towards the constellation 
Hercules. Such are the natural periods of the moral 
world, in proportion to the grandeur of its parts and 
relations ; such, the tendencies of man and society, 
considered as a complex whole ; however insensible 
the parallax of their progression, they doubtless gravi- 
tate incessantly to some distant constellation in the 
universe of brilliant possibilities ; to some space in 
the future where dwell and move forms of power 
21* 



246 



THE GREAT YEAR OF PROVIDENCE. 



and of good, which it is no fable to believe gigantic 
and godlike. 

In proportion, then, as we think well of our nature 
and of our kind ; in proportion as we estimate wor- 
thily the task of Providence in ripening a world of 
souls, shall we be reconciled to the tardy and inter- 
rupted steps by which the work proceeds. We shall 
be content and trustful, though our personal portion 
of the work, and even the sum of our combined 
endeavors while we live, should be inconspicuously 
small. Have you resolved, as much as in you lies, 
to lessen the number of those who, in this metropolis 
of the charities, have none to help them, or lift them 
from the darkness wherein they exist and perish 
unseen? It is good. Only remember, that if the 
ministry, which thus dives into the recesses of human 
wretchedness, and carries a healing pity to the body 
and the soul, which speaks to tempted, fallen, stricken 
men from a heart that feels their struggle terrible, yet 
believes the conquest possible, be really right and 
Christian, then its slowness is but the attendant and 
symptom of its worth ; and to despond because a 
few years' labor exhibits no large and deep impres- 
sion made on the wickedness and miseries of this 
great city, would be to slight the work and forget its 
dignity. When London, mother of mighty things, 
after the travail of centuries, brings forth woes, how 
can they be other than giant-woes, which no faint 
hope, no puny courage, but only the enterprise of 
high faith, can manacle and lay low. Surely it is 
an unworthy proposal which we sometimes hear 
respecting this and other deputed ministries of good, 
* Well, it is a doubtful experiment, but let us try it 
for a few years.' If, indeed, this means that, in case 



THE GREAT YEAH OF PROVIDENCE. 247 



of too small a measure of success, we are to do 
something more and greater ; that we must be con- 
tent with no niggardly and unproductive operation, 
but recognize in scanty results a call to stronger 
efforts ; that, failing a delegated ministry, we will go 
forth ourselves into the places of want and sin, and 
make aggression on them with a mercy that can wait 
no more ; in this sense, let the mission pass for a 
temporary trial. 

But if it be meant, that, disappointed in our hopes, 
we are to give it all up and do nothing ; that, having 
once set plainly before our face the beseeching 
looks of wounded and bleeding humanity stretched 
upon our path, we are to ' pass by on the other side,' 
thinking it enough to have ' come and seen where it 
was,' — then I must say that any work, undertaken 
in this spirit, has failed already. For my own part, 
I should say that were we even to make no visible 
progress, were we able to beat back the ills with 
which we contend by not one hair's breadth ; nay, 
were they to be seen actually advancing on us, still 
no retreat, but only the more strenuous aggression, 
would be admissible. For what purpose can any 
Christian say that he is here in life, with his divine 
intimation of what ought to be, and his sorrowing 
perception of what is, if not to put forth a perpetual 
endeavor against the downward gravitation of his 
own and others' nature ? And if in the conquest of 
evil, God can engage himself eternally, is it not a 
small thing for us to yield up to the struggle our 
threescore years and ten ? Whatever difficulties may 
baffle us, whatever defeat await us, it is our business 
to live with resistance in our will, and die with pro- 
test on our lips, and make our whole existence, not 



248 



THE GREAT YEAR OE PROVIDENCE. 



only in desire and prayer, but in resolve, in speech, 
in act, a remonstrance against whatever hurts and 
destroys in all the earth. Did we give heed to 
the counsels of passiveness and despondency, our 
Christendom, faithless to the trust consigned to it 
by Heaven, must perish by the forces to which it 
has succumbed. For, between the Christian faith, 
teaching the Fatherhood of God and the Immortality 
of men, — between this and the degradation of large 
portions of the human family, — there is an irrecon- 
cilable variance, an internecine war, to be interrupted 
by no parley, and mitigated by no quarter; and if 
faith gives up its aggression upon the evil, the evil 
must destroy the faith. If the world were all a 
slave-market or a gin-palace, what possible place 
could such a thing as the Christian religion find 
therein ? Who, amid a carnival of sin, could believe 
in any deathless sanctity ? or, through the steams of 
a besotted earth, discern the pure light of an over- 
arching heaven ? or, through the moans and dumb 
anguish of a race, send up a hymn of praise to the 
All-merciful ? And are there not thousands already, 
so environed and shut in, that their world is little 
else than this? In proportion as this number is per- 
mitted to increase, does Christianity lose its evidence, 
and become impossible. Sensualism and sin can- 
not abide the clear angelic look of Christian faith ; 
but if once that serene eye becomes confused and 
droops abashed, the foe starts up in demoniac tri- 
umph, and proclaims man to be a brute, and earth a 
grave. 

As we love, then, the religion by which we live, 
let us give no heed to doubt and fear. In the spirit 
of hope and firm endeavor, let us go forward with 



THE GREAT YEAE OF PROVIDENCE. 249 



the work we have begun ; undismayed by difficulties 
which God permits us to hold in check, but not to 
vanquish ; and stipulating for no rewards of large 
success as the conditions of our constancy of service. 
Our reliance for good results, and our consolation 
under their postponement, is in the essentially re- 
ligious elements of this ministry; were its methods 
purely economic, addressing themselves exclusively 
to the bodily wants of its objects ; or intellectual, 
working at their self-interest and self-will, — I, for 
one, should despair of any return w T orthy of much 
patience. But going forth as we do with that divine 
and penetrative religion, to whose subduing energy 
so many centuries and nations have borne their testi- 
mony, and continuing only that evangelizing process, 
before which so much wretchedness and guilt have 
already yielded, we take our appointed place in the 
long history of Christianity, and attempt a work for 
which, like Providence, we can afford to wait. It is 
human, indeed, to desire some rich success ; and 
each generation expects to gather and taste the pro- 
duce of its own toil ; but the seasons of God are 
eternal ; he ' giveth the increase,' not for enjoyment 
only, but for reproduction ; and ripens secretly, be- 
neath the thick foliage of events, many a fruit of 
our moral tillage, for the sake of the little unnoticed 
seed, which, dropped on the soil of his Providence, 
shall spread over a future age the shelter of some tree 
of life. Be it ours in word to proclaim, in deed to 
make ready, the < acceptable year of the Lord.' 



XX. 



CHRIST AND THE LITTLE CHILD. 
Luke xylti. 17. 

verily i sat unto you, whosoeyer shall not receiye the 
kingdom of god as a little child, shall in no wise enter 

THEREIN. 

By the kingdom of God was meant neither the 
future state of the righteous, nor the dominion of 
Christianity in the world; but the personal reign of 
Messiah over a favored and faithful people, on a 
renovated earth. The prospect of this period was, 
however, to the people of Palestine, nearly what the 
hope of heaven is to the Christian: — it embodied all 
their ideas of divine privilege and happiness, and, 
coinciding with their conception of religious exist- 
ence, became their great symbol, by which to express 
the most blessed system of relations between the hu- 
man mind and God. Into this system they esteemed 
it their birth-right to enter ; the title and prerogative 
were in their blood, — the blood of patriarchs whom 
they had ceased to resemble, and of prophets of 
whose spirit they had none. At the gate of the king- 
dom they looked with no meek and far-off desire ; they 
knelt and knocked with no suppliant air, breathing 
such confessions of unworthiness as give security for 
gratitude ; but turned on it the greedy eye of property, 



CHUIST AND THE LITTLE CHILD. 



251 



and rushed to it with intent to ' do what they liked 
with their own,' — so that 'the kingdom of heaven 
suffered violence, and the violent would take it by 
force.' Scarcely were they content with the notion of 
admission as its subjects ; they must be its lords and 
administrators too. For them, thought the Pharisees, 
were its dignities and splendors created, for them its 
patronage reserved ; and the glorious sovereignty of 
God was to be, not over them, but by them ; so that, 
in every proffer of their services to Him, they con- 
templated, not the humility of submission, but the 
pride of command. Before such it was that Jesus 
held in his arms a child, gazing on his face, no doubt, 
in wonder, not without a pleased look of trust, and 
said, ' Whosoever shall not receive'the kingdom of 
God as a little child, shall in no wise enter therein.' 

The occasion was slight and transient; the senti- 
ment is profound and universal. In no other way 
could our Lord have made the irreligion of the Phari- 
sees' temper more obvious, because nowhere could 
he have found a more genuine emblem of the pure 
religious spirit than in a child. Not, as will hereafter 
appear, because a child's heart is peculiarly devo- 
tional; nor because the moral qualities of early life 
possess the romantic purity and perfection sometimes 
ascribed to them; much less, because maturity affords 
a less fitting scope for the exercise of the holy mind ; 
but, because the relations of infancy resemble the 
religious relations ; the natural conditions of its exist- 
ence are the same that are felt by the devout heart ; 
and hence without any singularity of merit, the spirit 
of childhood, acquired by simple accommodations to 
the laws of its being, is a just representative of the 
temper which devotion imparts to the mature. Let 



252 



CHRIST AND THE LITTLE CHILD. 



us trace some of the analogies between the spirit of 
childhood and the spirit of religion. 

Religion, it is obvious, can have place only in 
created and dependent minds. God cannot be de- 
vout; and though we have a term, viz. 'AoZz/,' appli- 
cable, as an epithet of moral description, to him in 
common with good men, the word, singularly enough, 
expresses, in reference to the human mind, precisely 
the only quality which cannot possibly attach to the 
Divine; — l a holy man 9 meaning one whose excel- 
lence has a religious root; — 'a holy God' denoting 
the only being in the spiritual universe, whose per- 
fections are unsusceptible of the colors of religious 
emotion. He who has no higher than himself must 
be stranger to the unspeakable reverence that gazes 
upwards on a goodness not its own; he who is him- 
self the measure of all that is divine is unconscious of 
the presence of a yet diviner ; and though we cannot 
speak of his moral attributes, without implying that 
he respects and loves the right, yet his venerating 
regards must look for this great idea, not forth, as on 
some outward being who furnish the conception, but 
within, where alone is the Infinitude that befits the 
Infinite. 

Yet it is not strictly Deity alone whose nature 
may exclude the possibilities of religion. This peculi- 
arity may arise, without our seeking it at that supreme 
height. A mind, possessed not of literal Omniscience, 
but of power simply equal to its conceptions, a mind 
absolute within its own realm, and limited only by 
its desires, would be incapable of veneration, because 
unconscious of a superior; and though he might 
really live in a narrow ring environed by the im- 
measurable deep of things, — so long as he mistook 



CHRIST AND THE LITTLE CHILD. 253 

its circle for the total universe, he would feel, not as 
dependent, but as God, — Lord of his little island 
in the sea of things, and ignorant of all beyond. Not 
till we are embraced by some necessity, and see its 
limits closing us in, can the opportunity and spirit of 
religion begin. So long as self-will is the sole law, 
and sits upon its throne, surrounded by obedient ser- 
vitors, and in unresisted practice of command, the 
relations from which piety springs do not subsist. 
The exercise of power will not induce the idea of 
obligation, or the temper of submission. It is when 
we are struck down by some blow that extorts the 
cry of dependence, when we feel the pressure of 
foreign forces like a weight of darkness on us, when 
within us moves the strife that ends sometimes in the 
triumph of success, sometimes in the collapse of 
weakness, that the heart acknowledges a relation to 
that which is above, as well as that which is beneath. 
And even then, though submission is clearly inevit- 
able, not so are the sentiments of religion ; for there is 
still a question, submit with hate, or submit with love? 
And it is the blessed peculiarity of devotion, that it 
abdicates self-will, not sullenly but with joy, has no 
enmity to the power that restrains it, but a reverence 
deep and tender, so that to feel the controlling pre- 
sence becomes the prime condition of its peace, and to 
be stricken of God and afflicted is better than to be 
left to itself, and be at peace. 4 Let me alone, and 
torment me not,' is the cry of discontent ; ' break me 
in sorrow, but depart not from me,' is the prayer of 
piety. Such a suppliant has found the force of 
compulsion turned into the law of duty ; and invert- 
ing its direction, instead of crushing to the earth, it 
lifts him to the skies. If once he said with deep 
22 



254 



CHRIST AXD THE LITTLE CHILD. 



reluctance, '-I must, therefore I will,' he has now fused 
a divine element into that better word, and finds it 
a glad thing to say, '•I ought, therefore I will.' Ought 
is the heavenly reading for ^must? From the iron 
sceptre of necessity he has forged a weapon of 
ethereal temper; wherewith may be won victories 
more sublime than all the achievements of physical 
omnipotence. 

Self-will then, so far as it operates, excludes the 
sentiments of religion; while it is of their very essence 
to live reverently and happily under a law not always 
coinciding with self-will. It is this whieh presents 
us with the first analogy between the spirit of child- 
hood and the spirit of religion. 

What, indeed, can be a truer picture of man in 
creation, than the position of a child in its own home? 
How silently, yet how surely, does the domestic rule 
control him, dating his rising and his rest, his going 
out and coming in, apportioning his duties and 
his mirth, ordering secretly the very current of his 
thoughts, whether it sparkle with gladness, or over- 
flow with tears ! Yet how rarely has he any painful 
sense of the constraining force which is every moment 
on him ! Hemmed in on every side by a power more 
vigilant than the most jealous despotism, yet look at 
his open brow, and say, whether creature ever was 
more free? And why? Not certainly because child- 
ish minds are destitute of self-will that would seduce 
them into transgression; but because where reverence 
and love make melody in the heart, the temper is 
charmed and sleeps. Light, therefore, as the weight 
of the circumambient atmosphere upon the body, is 
the pressure of home duty upon the child ; easy by 
the constancy and completeness with which it shuts 



CHBIST AND THE LITTLE CHILD. 



255 



him in ; inseparable from the vital elements of his 
being. His life is an exchange of obedience for pro- 
tection ; he gives submission, and is sheltered. Fold- 
ed in the arms of an unspeakable affection, he is 
screened from the anxieties of self-care. Not yet is 
he left alone upon the infinite plain of existence, to 
choose a path by the dim, sad lustre of his own wis- 
dom, but is led gently on by the unextinguished lamp 
of a father's experience, and the meek starlight of a 
mother's love. In strangeness and danger, how close 
he keeps to the hand that leads him ! In doubt, how 
he looks up to interpret the eye that speaks to him ! 
In loss and loneliness, with what cries and tears he 
sits down to lament his freedom ! He asks, but 
claims nothing; his momentary forwardness stilled 
perhaps by a mere word ; and, if not, yet his spon- 
taneous return after an interval, to his accustomed 
ways, confesses that in the order of obedience is 
the truest liberty. 

In a like free and natural movement within the 
limits of a higher law, in like obedience refreshing 
because reverential, in like consciousness of a wiser 
and holier presence, from whom we withhold nothing, 
not even ourselves, consists the spirit of true piety ; 
nor can any dwell on earth or in heaven, finding it a 
kingdom of God, but as the loving child dwelleth 
within his home. Unhappily, this temper is apt to 
be worn away by the hard attrition of maturer life. 
Our human relations are then reversed ; we succeed, 
in natural course, to habits of command : the pride of 
power spoils us ; the mental attitudes of reverence 
become uneasy ; the eye bent unceasingly down on 
the petty realm of which we are lords, omits to look 
up on the infinite empire of which we are subjects. 



256 



CHRIST AND THE LITTLE CHILD. 



And thus might we become shut up in the dry crust 
of our self-will, if no embassage of suffering descend- 
ed, and loosed the fountain of grief. Then the spirit 
of early years return upon good hearts, and they be- 
come ashamed, not of their new submission to the 
Great Parent, but of their long estrangement from 
his abode. A piety, like that of Christ, thus brings 
together the characteristic affections of different peri- 
ods of life, and keeps fresh the beauty of them all ; it 
puts us back to whatever is blessed in childhood, 
without abating one glory of our manhood; upon the 
embers of age, it kindles once more the early fires of 
life, to send their genial glow through the evening 
chamber of the soul, and shine with playful and mel- 
lowed light through its darkened windows, — bright- 
est sign of a cheerful home to the passer by in storm 
and rain. By this restoration, let me repeat it, the 
religious mind loses no one glory of its manhood ; it 
is not a substitution of passive meekness for active 
energy, of a devout effeminacy for natural vigor. For 
while the habit of successful rule, taking the lead, is 
apt to disqualify for submission, and render the mind 
restive under necessity, there is nothing in a deep 
reverence of soul which encroaches on the capacities 
for command. "What was it that armed the Maid of 
Orleans for field and siege, and enabled her to erect 
again the prostrate courage of a nation? What was 
it that endowed a Washington with a power, in arms 
and peace, which no veterans could break, nor any 
rival supplant? It was this; that with them the ex- 
ercise of command was itself the practice of obedi- 
ence ; — obedience to a high faith within the heart, — 
to a venerated idea of duty and of God ; and authority, 
thus deprived of its imperiousness and its caprice, 



CHRIST AND THE LITTLE CHILD. 



257 



thus moderated to an inflexible justice, and worn with 
a divine simplicity, strikes into human observers an 
awe, a delight, a trust, which are themselves the high- 
est fruits of power. When men perceive that their 
very rulers are susceptible of obedience, and are fol- 
lowing the guidance of reverential thoughts, it estab- 
lishes a point of sympathy, and softens the hardships 
of submission. "What parent knows not that then 
only are his orders listened to as oracles, when they 
are sent forth, not with the harsh clangor of self-will, 
but in the quiet tones that issue from behind the 
shrine of duty ? 

In the construction which I have given to the sen- 
timent of Christ, it is not necessary to assume that 
the infant mind is peculiarly susceptible of religious 
impressions ; or that because it is taken as the em- 
blem of the kingdom of heaven, it must on that ac- 
count be laboriously and prematurely crowded with 
theological ideas ; the issue of which would be an 
artificial assumption of states of sentiment, and an 
affectation of desires, wholly unnatural and unreal, 
and absolutely incapable as yet, of any deep root 
of sincerity. Except in circumstances of sickness or 
grief, which prematurely ripen the mind, and make 
its wants anticipate its years, childhood has little 
need of a religion, in our sense of the word ; for God 
has given it, in its very lot, a religion of its own, the 
sufficiency of which it were impiety to doubt. The 
child's veneration can scarcely climb to any loftier 
height, than the soul of a wise and good parent; — 
well even, if he can distantly, and with a wistful con- 
templation, scan even that. How can there be for 
him diviner truth than his father's knowledge, a more 
wondrous world than his fathers experience, a better 



258 



CHRIST AND THE LITTLE CHILD. 



Providence than his mother's vigilance, a securer 
fidelity than in their united promise ? Encompassed 
round by these, he rests as in the embrace of the only 
omniscience he can comprehend. Nor let this domes- 
tic faith suffer disturbance before its time. It is 
enough if he but sees the parents bend with silent 
awe, or hears them speak as if they were children too, 
before a holier still ; this will carry on the ideal gra- 
dation of reverence, and show the filmy deep where 
the steps ascend the skies. And then, when the time 
of free-will is come, and youth is cast forth from its 
protection into the bewildering forces, now fierce and 
now seductive, of mid-life, religion comes in, as the 
just and natural successor to domestic influences ; 
shaping forth, for the heart's shelter in the wild im- 
mensity, the walls of an adamantine Providence, and 
spreading over the uncovered head the dome of im- 
mortality. O it is thus only that we mortals, in our 
maturity of energy and passion, can dwell on earth 
in purity and peace. By a polity of self-interest, and 
adjustments of promotion, and agencies of fear, we 
might, no doubt, have the world governed as a 
camp or a prison ; but by faith alone can we dwell 
in it as a home, and nestle domestically in our allot- 
ted portion of space and time. Taught by Christ, we 
glance at the visible creation, once so awful, so full of 
forces rushing we know not whither, and involving 
us in their indomitable speed, — and it becomes the 
mansion of God's house, peaceful as a fathers abode ; 
the sun that warms us is our domestic hearth ; and 
the blue canopy roofs us in with unspeakable protec- 
tion. And as for life and its struggles, its stormiest 
conflicts are but the mimic battles, whereby the spirits 
ual athlete trains himself for a higher theatre ; and if 



CHRIST AXD THE LITTLE CHILD. 



259 



perchance among the restless multitude that hurry 
over the scene, a neighbor should fall, shall I not help 
him, though it be his own demon passion that rends 
him ? O child of my Father, wounded, bleeding, and 
worn by inward woes, turn not thy face away ; let 
me lift thee from thy bed of rock, and stretch thee on 
the green sod of a pure affection ; for am I not thy 
brother, stricken in thy stripes, and healed in thy 
rest ? 

This restoration to us of the filial feelings is the 
main illustrative point in our Lord's analogy between 
the spirit of piety and that of infancy. But there are 
other characteristics of childhood, which religion 
renders back to us, freshened and ennobled. To the 
child, the time before him seems to have no end. It 
is long before he essays to measure it all ; and when 
he does, it is only to prove it immeasurable. The 
next year is as a gigantic bridge that joins the two 
eternities; and as for all beyond, it is a land bound- 
less, safe; verdant as the spring meadow, and flooded 
over with gladdest sunshine. The open graves lie hid 
among the grass ; and the horizon shows not the little 
cloud, that shall bring up the overcasting of the heav- 
ens. Let a few years pass, and how does the vast 
field contract itself, and the stability of things seem 
shaken! The merry playmates, whose laugh still 
rings in our memory, by what storms have they been 
shattered ; and now wander, dispersed, like a ship- 
wrecked crew, whose faithful hearts could keep 
together no longer, against necessities so sharp. Be- 
fore the middle of our natural career the wastes 
of vicissitude become deplorable ; nor could any 
thoughtful man, if abandoned to physical impres- 
sions, feel the great mountain of life crumbling away 



260 



CHRIST AND THE LITTLE CHILD. 



beneath him, and see portion after portion dropping 
into the abyss on which it seems built, till but a film 
separates him too from the gulf, without the chill of 
an awe most sad. But this impression of a mourn- 
ful brevity in our existence the spirit of our faith cor- 
rects. To the life, which had begun to appear like a 
process of continual loss, it adds another which is an 
everlasting gain ; and we look again upon the future 
with eyes of childlike joy, seeing that, as our infant 
hearts had said, it hath no end, nor any grief that 
can endure. From the cypress tree beneath whose 
shadow we had placed ourselves to weep, we pass 
on with lightened step into the paradise of God, 
where is a rustling as of whispers of divinest peace, 
and hills, truly called eternal, close us round. 

O blest beyond expression are they who, by this 
spirit of Christ, call back the freshness of their early 
years, and shed it over the wisdom of maturity ; who, 
by attaching the great and transforming idea of God 
to everything, deprive the humblest exisetence of its 
monotony; who hear in the speech, and behold in 
the incidents, of every day, somewhat that is sacred ! 
For them life has no satiety, disappointment no sting. 
They bear within them a penetrative power, which 
pierces beneath the earthy surface of things, and 
detects a meaning that is heavenly ; enriching com- 
mon sentiment with profound truth ; lifting common 
duties from the conventional and the respectable 
into the holy and divine ; and amid trials of the hour, 
giving dignity to that which else were humiliating 
and mean. 



XXL 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF OLD AGE. 

Philemon 9. 

foe loye's sake i ratiier beseech thee, being such a one as 
paul the aged. 

The reverence for age is a striking and refreshing 
feature in the civilization of ancient and Pagan 
times. The frequent traces of it in the literature of 
Greece and Home, compared with the silence of 
Christian precept on the subject, might be thought 
to indicate that this sentiment owes no obligation to 
Christianity, and has a better home in the human- 
ities of nature, than in the suggestions of faith. The 
conclusion, however, would be wholly unwarrantable ; 
and would never occur, except to those who do not 
look beyond the letter into the spirit of a system, and 
who think to understand a religion by arithmetical 
reckoning of its maxims. Every system naturally 
strengthens most its weakest points. That Cicero 
wrote a treatise upon Age, and expended on it all the 
ingenuity of his philosophy, and the graces of his 
dialogue, proves that he regarded this department of 
morality with anxiety and apprehension ; nor would 
Christianity have left the topic untouched, if its spirit 
and faith had not lifted this class of duties beyond 
the danger of neglect. A decline of tenderness tow- 



262 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF OLD AGE. 



ards the aged, — mean or even melancholy sentiments 
with respect to their infirmities, can never arise with- 
out scepticism of human immortality, and a total 
defection from the Christian mind. 

The dignity of age in the ancient world, was sus- 
tained by many considerations, of mingled expediency 
and affection, which retain with us but little force. 
Of how many honors has the printing-press alone 
deprived the hoary head! It has driven out the era, 
so genial to the old, of spoken wisdom, and threatens 
a reign of silence, by putting all knowledge and ex- 
perience into type. The patriarch of a community 
can never be restored to the kind of importance which 
he possessed in the elder societies of the world. He 
was his neighbor's chronicler ; bearing within him 
the only extant image of many departed scenes and 
memorable deeds, and able to link the dim traditions 
of the past with the living incidents of the present. 
He was their most qualified counsellor ; his memory 
serving as the archives of the state, and supplying 
many a passage of history illustrative of existing 
emergencies, and solving some civic perplexity. He 
was their poet; representative of an age already 
passed from the actual into the ideal ; associate or 
contemporary of men whose names have become ven- 
erable ; and in the oft-repeated tale of other days, 
from which time has expelled whatever was prosaic, 
weaving the retrospect of life into an Epic. He was 
their priest ; loving to nurture wonder and spread the 
sense of mystery, by recounting the authentic prodi- 
gies of his or his father's years, when omen and 
prophecy were no dubious things, but sober verities 
which Providence had not yet begrudged the still 
pious earth. From all these prerogatives he is now 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF OLD AGE. 



263 



deposed, supplanted in his authority by the journal 
and the library ; whose speechless and impersonal lore 
coldly, but effectually, supplies the wants once served 
by the living voice of elders kindling with the inspi- 
ration of the past. 

By far other and higher considerations does Chris- 
tianity sustain reverential sentiments towards age. 
In the shape which they formerly assumed, they were 
the effects and marks of an imperfect intellectual 
civilization ; surviving now, they are a part of the 
devout humanities, diffused by the spirit of Christ. 
But for that spirit, every change which made the old 
less useful, would have made them less revered. But 
the merely social and utilitarian estimate of human 
beings can never become prevalent, so long as faith 
in the immortal soul is genuine and sincere, and 
Jesus is permitted to teach in his own way the honor 
that is due to all men. To him did God give it to 
be the great foe of all scorn .and negligence of heart ; 
nor are there any tenants of life on whose lot he has 
shed a greater sanctity, than on those who are visibly 
on the verge of their departure. Let us observe for a 
few moments, how Christianity teaches the world to 
look upon the aged. 

Not, certainly, as its worn-out tools, who have done 
their work, and are fit only to be flung aside to rust as 
worthless things. Not with sordid discontent, as on 
unwelcome and tedious guests, that they linger still 
to consume a hospitality which they will never repay, 
and keep possession of sources of enjoyment, on 
which more vivid appetites are impatient to enter. 
For wherever the slightest vestige of such feelings 
exists, there can be no remembrance of that higher 
field of service, of that nobler and more finished work, 



284 



THE CHRISTIANITY OE OLD AGE. 



for which time, to its last beat, continues to prepare. 
So Epicurean a thought dwells in the crust of selfish- 
ness and sense, and has never felt the pure breath of 
faith and reverence. Is there nothing which can 
drive us from this infatuation, and persuade us to 
look at a human being, not for what he has, but 
for what he is ? Is he nothing then but a pensioner 
of Mammon, whose pittance is a pleasant sight for 
greedy eyes ? Can we see him decline step by step 
to the brink of the dark abyss, till the ground crum- 
bles beneath him and he slips in, and yet spend all 
our anxiety on the dropped cloak he has left behind ? 

Nor are the mere feelings of instinctive compas- 
sion towards weakness and selfishness those with 
which Christianity encourages us to look on age. 
For these contemplate only its physical attributes ; 
they virtually deny or overlook all its claims, except 
those of its animal infirmities; and show a mind for- 
getful of the capacities within, latent perhaps, but yet 
imperishable, that have toiled in a great work, and 
are on the threshold of a greater ; that can know no 
eclipse but that of shame, nor any decrepitude but 
that of sin. 

It has been imagined that religious faith does not 
like to draw attention to the decline which precedes, 
often by years, the approach of death ; that the spec- 
tacle of a human being in ruins terrifies the expecta- 
tion of futurity, and humbles the mind with mean 
suspicions of its destiny. Scepticism, which delights 
in all the ill-bodings which can be drawn from evil 
and decay, takes us to the corner where the old man 
sits; shows us the bent frame, and fallen cheeks, and 
closing avenues of sense ; points to the palsied head, 
and compels us to listen to the drivelling speech, or 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF OLD AGE. 265 

perhaps the childish and pitiable cry ; and then asks, 
whether this is the being so divinely gifted and so 
solemnly placed, sharer of the immortality of God, 
and waiting to embark into infinitude ? I answer, 
— assuredly not; neither in the wrecked frame, nor in 
the negation of mind, is there anything immortal ; it 
is not this frail and shattered bark, visible to the eye, 
that is to be launched upon the shoreless sea. The 
mind within, which you do not show me, whose indi- 
cations are for a time suppressed, — as they are in 
every fever that brings stupor and delirium, in every 
night even that brings sleep, — the mind of whose 
high achievements, whose capacious thought, whose 
toils and triumphs of conscience and affection, living 
friends will reverentially tell you, — the mind, which 
every moment of God's time for seventy years has 
been sedulous to build, and from which the deforming 
scaffold is about to fall away, — this alone is the prin- 
ciple for which we claim immortality. Say not that, 
because we cannot trace its operations, it is extinct ; 
perhaps while you speak, it may burst into a flame, 
and contradict you. For sometimes age is known to 
wake, and the soul to kindle, ere it departs ; to per- 
forate the shut gates of sense with sudden light, and 
gush with lustre to the eye, and love and reason to 
the speech ; as if to make it evident, that death may 
be nativity ; as if the traveller, who had fallen asleep 
with the fatigues of the way, conscious that he drew 
near his journey's end, and warned by the happy note 
of arrival, looked out refreshed and eager through the 
morning air for the fields and streams of his new 
abode. And if any transient excitement near the 
close of life, can, even occasionally, thus resuscitate 
the spirit ; if some vehement stroke upon a chord of 

23 



266 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF OLD AGE. 



ancient sympathy can sometimes restore it in its 
strength, it is there still ; and only waits that perma- 
nent rejuvenescence which its escape into the infinite 
may effect at once. 

It is not a little difficult to understand, in what 
way these objectors would desire to improve the ad- 
justments of life, in order to get rid of the grounds of 
their scepticism. Would they totally abolish the in- 
firmities of years, and maintain the energy of youth 
unto the end ? Then would there remain no apparent 
reason for removal or change ; death would have 
looked tenfold more like extinction than it does now; 
and we should assuredly have reasoned, ' If the Divine 
Father, in his benignity, had intended us to per- 
severe in life at all, he would have left us in peace in 
this dear old world.' As it is, there appears, after 
the decrepitude of age, an obvious need of some such 
mighty revolution as death ; the mortality of such a 
body becomes a clear essential to the immortality of 
the soul ; and our departure assumes the probable as- 
pect of a simple migration of the mind, — a journey 
of refreshment, — a passage to new scenes of that in- 
finite universe, to a mere speck of which, since we can 
discover its immensity, it seems unlikely that we 
should be confined. 

Or is the demand of a different kind ; not for im- 
munity from bodily decline, but for an exemption of 
the soul from its effects ? for faculties unconscious of 
the sinking frame, — dwelling in a tenement of whose 
changes they shall be independent ? And what is 
this, when you reflect upon it, but to ask for a total 
separation of the material from the spiritual element 
of our nature, — for the very boon which we suppose 
to be obtained in death, a disembodied mind ? For 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF OLD AGE. 



267 



a corporeal frame, that did not affect' the mental 
principle, would no more be any proper part of us, 
than the limbs of another man, or the substance of 
the sun ; its mere juxtaposition or coincidence in 
space with our sentient soul (even could such a thing 
be truly affirmed), would not mix it up with our 
identity. Unless it were the interposed medium 
through which we communicated with the external 
world, — the appointed pathway of sensation; unless, 
that is, we experienced vicissitudes of internal con- 
sciousness precisely corresponding to all its external 
changes, — we should have no interest in it, and it 
would have as little concern with our personality as 
the clothes or the elements in which we live. A 
hand that should leave us affected in the same way, 
whether it touched ice or fire ; a tongue that should 
recognize no difference between food and poison ; an 
eye that should convey to us the same impression 
through all its altering states, — would be unfitted 
for all its functions, and be a mere foreign encum- 
brance upon our life. That our organization reports 
instantly, with a speed that no magnetic signal can 
surpass, to the mind within ; that it works changes 
in our conscious principle precisely proportionate to 
its own, and affording a true measure of them, — is 
the very attribute which constitutes its exactitude 
and perfection. If, then, it were absurd to wish for 
limbs that could undergo exhaustion and laceration 
without our feeling them, and nerves that would give 
no knowledge of fever or inflammation, it would be 
no less irrational to desire a release of the mind from 
those infirmities of age, which are but a long fatigue, 
life's final disease. All the lights of perception and 
emotion flow in upon us through the colored glass of 



268 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF OLD AGE. 



our organic frame ; and however perfect the power 
of mental vision may remain, if the windows be 
darkened, the radiance will be obscure. 

And in the two most marked characteristics of old 
age, — the obtuseness of immediate perception, and 
freshness of remote memories, — may we not even 
discern an obvious intimation of the great future, 
and a fitting preparative for its approach ? The 
senses become callous and decline, verging gently to 
the extinction which awaits them, and in their dark- 
ness permitting the mild lustre of wisdom and of 
faith — if it be there — to shine forth and glow ; and 
if not, to show in what a night the soul dwells with- 
out them. And that the mind should betake itself, 
ere it departs, with sach exclusive attachment to the 
past, is surely suitable to its position. True, the 
enthusiastic devotion of an awed spectator, standing 
near to say farewell, naturally takes the opposite 
direction, and steals before the pilgrim to his home, 
and wonders that the old man's talk can linger so 
around things gone by. But is it not that already 
the thoughts fall into the order of judgment, and 
practise the incipient meditations of Heaven ? In 
that world of which we have no experience, we can 
at first have no anticipation ; and in the place whither 
we go for retribution, we must begin with retrospect. 
All things and thoughts, all passions and pursuits, 
must live again ; stricken memory cannot withhold 
them ; there is a divination of conscience, at which 
their ghosts must rise, to haunt or bless us. And 
when the old man incessantly reverts to years that 
had receded into the far distance, and finds scenes 
that had appeared to vanish come back even from 
his boyhood, and stand around him with preternatural 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF OLD AGE. 



269 



distinctness, when ancient snatches of life's melodies 
thrill through his dreams, and the faces of early 
friends look in upon him often, the preparation is 
significant. He is gathering his witnesses together, 
making ready the theatre of trial, and collecting the 
audience for judgment. These are they that were 
with him in his manifold temptations, and can tell 
him of his victory or his fall; that exercised such 
spirit of duty as was in him ; whom his selfishness 
injured, or his fidelity blessed. Remembrance has 
broken the seals of its tombs ; its sainted dead come 
forth at the trump of God within the soul, and declare 
the tribunal set. 

With emotions, then, far different from the mean- 
ness of animal compassion, and the coldness of doubt, 
does the spirit of Christ teach the world to look on 
age. The veneration for it, which our religion in- 
spires, comes not from the past alone, but rather from 
the future. In any view, indeed, the long-travelled 
and experienced mortal, in whose mind are the only 
pictures of many scenes effaced, and time's land- 
scape in rare perspective, must be regarded with 
strong interest. If life were but a brief reality, that 
fleetly passed into a shadow and nothingness, the 
point of vanishing would not be without its solemn 
grandeur. But with how profound a reverence must 
we look on its last stage, as entering the margin of 
God's eternity ; as the land-mark of earth's boundary- 
ocean, fanned already by the winds, and feeling the 
spray, of the infinite ! 

Nor are the feelings less humanizing and holy with 
which Christianity teaches the aged disciple to regard 
the world and himself. He leaves it, — if he be a 
disciple, — not with censoriousness, but with faith ; 
23* 



270 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF OLD AGE. 



knowing that, with all its generations, the earth, as 
well as his own mind, is a thing young in the years 
of eternal Providence. He has too large a vision to 
be readily cast down about its prospects. If its 
social changes are not to his desire ; if that for which 
he battled as for the true and good seems even to be 
retreating from his hopes, and questionable novelties 
to be deceiving the hearts of men, — yet he sinks 
without despair, and waves, as he retires, a cheerful 
and affectionate adieu. He has too vivid a sense of 
the brevity of a human life, to despond at any vicis- 
situdes that may occur, any tendencies that may 
disclose themselves, within such space. He freely 
blesses God, that when, from its altered ways, the 
world has become no longer congenial to him, he is 
permitted to leave it ; and he can rejoice that those 
who remain behind behold it with different eyes ; for 
he recognizes and admires God's law, that those 
who are to live in the world shall not be out of love 
with it. From the mental station which he occupies, 
it certainly seems as if twilight were gathering fast 
and leading on the night ; and so for two things he 
is thankful ; that the vesper-bell flings its note upon 
his ear, and calls him to prayer and rest; and that 
on others of his race, who gaze into the heavens from 
a different point, the morning seems to be rising, 
and its fresh breeze to be up, and the matin rings its 
summons, — for always there must be prayer; only 
at dawn it leads to labor, and at eve to rest. Nor 
does he leave the world which has been his locality 
so long, as a scene in which he has no further 
interest. Possibly even its future changes may not 
be hidden from his view ; and at all events his sym- 
pathies dwell and will dwell there still ; and all that 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF OLD AGE. 



271 



most truly constitutes his being, the work he has 
done, the wills he has moved, the loving thoughts 
he has awakened, remain behind ; enter the great 
structure of human existence, and share its perpe- 
tuity. 

The aged, ere they depart, are able to report to us 
something of the exactitude of the Divine retribution. 
The justice of God does not always delay and post- 
pone its sentence till it is inaudible to the living. 
There are some of our human works that ' go before 
us to judgment;' and the verdict may be apprehend- 
ed by every attentive mind. Our nature does not 
all die at the same moment; but the animal elements 
begin to vanish, while the moral still remain. And 
truly those in whom the lower self has been permitted 
to gain a terrible ascendency, those whose life has 
been in obedience to the precept ' eat and be filled,' 
meet their dreary recompense in age ; one part of 
their moral probation is visibly and awfully brought 
to its close ; and in the miseries of a blank and 
chafing mind, a querulous imbecility of temper, a 
heart unrefreshed by a warm sympathy, every eye 
may discern the issue. But when the soul has been 
faithful to the higher purposes of existence ; when 
there has been a benign observance of the moral 
relations which give dignity to life ; when the sym- 
pathies of kindred and neighborhood and society, the 
exercise of intelligent thought, the practice of unos- 
tentatious benevolence, the tranquil maintenance of 
faith and trust, have engaged and consecrated the 
years of best vigor, — there, even though the nobler 
fires of nature grow languid and decline, the mild 
light of a good heart shines to the last, cheerful to 
all observers, and casts no faint illumination on past 



272 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF OLD AGE. 



and future. The peace of God full often survives 
the lapse of meaner comforts, and drives away every 
trace of fretful ness from age and terror from death ; 
leaving simply the rest incident to the completion of 
a good and worthy fight ; and preparing all hearts to 
hope for a quiet migration to a better country, even 
a heavenly. Calm as this, after a fiery career, was 
the retirement of ' such a one as Paul the Aged,' 
when £ the time of his departure was at hand.' 



XXII. 

NOTHING HUMAN EVER DIES. 



ECCLESIASTES VII. 17- 
WHY SHOULDST THOU DIE BEFORE THY TIME? 

The only resource for a man without faith, is to 
be also without love; which, indeed, by the com- 
passion of heaven, he will naturally be. For scarcely 
can anything be more serious than the aspect which 
life assumes, when any considerable portion of it lies 
in retrospect beneath an affectionate eye that can dis- 
cern no more than its visible and palpable relations. 
A few years of unconscious gain, followed by a long 
process of conscious loss, complete the story of our 
being here. The best shelter that the world affords 
us is the first, — the affections into which we are 
born, and which are too natural for us to know their 
worth, till they are disturbed ; — for constant bless- 
ings, like constant pressures, are the last to be dis- 
covered. During the whole period of childhood, when 
the most rapid and astonishing development of vi- 
tality and acquisition of power are going on, the 
wonder and the bliss are hidden from our eyes; 
gratitude is scarcely possible ; and the delighted gaze 
of the contemplating spectator is unintelligible. We 
wake up at our first grave affliction; oar blindness is 
removed by pain ; the film is purified by tears, and 



274 



NOTHING HUMAN EVEE DIES. 



alas ! the moment sorrow gives us sight, the good 
that we behold is gone. And thenceforth we love 
knowingly, and lose constantly; and after dreaming 
that all things were given to us, or even by nature 
our own, we find them only lent, and see in our re- 
maining years the un deciphered list of their recall. 
Standing on the shore which bounds the ocean of 
the Past, we see treasure after treasure receding in 
the distance, or thrown into that insatiable waste, on 
whose surface they make a momentary smile of light, 
then leave the gulf in darkness. Into that deep, year 
after year has sunk, no less rich than this* in spoils 
from the human heart. Our fathers and our early 
homes, the dream of our first friendships, the surprise 
of new affections, and all the delicious marvels of life 
yet fresh, have vanished there. And soon, when we 
have been the losers long enough, we shall become 
the lost ; and vainly struggle with the sweep of the 
unfathomable sea. Whether death, which treads 
closely on the step of life upon our world, shall ever 
absolutely overtake it, and finally stop the race of 
beauty and of love which now is perpetually begun 
afresh ; — whether the chills of winter, transient now, 
will become eternal, and suppress for ever the flowers 
which can yet steal out again on the bosom of the 
earth ; — whether the frost of mortality shall hereafter 
arrest the life-stream of our race, and dismiss us to 
that extinction which has fallen on other tribes before 
us ; — and the clouds fly, and the shrill hail fall over 
a naked world, — we know not. But to us, in suc- 
cession, all things die. The past contains all that 
time has rendered dear and familiar; and that passes 

* This Discourse was preached on the last day of the year. 



NOTHING HUMAN EVER DIES. 



275 



silently away; the future contains whatever is cold 
and strange ; and its mysteries come swiftly on us. 

Yet in this melancholy retrospect, natural as it is 
to our affections, there is a great deal of illusion, 
which is the occasion of half its sadness. When 
we go out of ourselves and our affairs, and seize 
a higher point of view, we see that this world is no 
such collection of perishable things, after all ; that as 
God lives ever in it, he gathers around, him all that 
is most like him, and suffers nothing that is excellent 
to die. There are things in this world which are not 
meant to perish; — works which survive the work- 
men, and multiply blessings when they are gone, and 
make all who lend a faithful hand to thern, part of 
the husbandry of God, laborers with Him on that 
great field of time, whose culture and whose harvests 
are everlasting. The pains we spend upon our mor- 
tal selves, will perish with ourselves ; but the care we 
give out of a good heart to others, the efforts of dis- 
interested duty, the deeds and thoughts of pure affec- 
tion, are never lost; they are liable to no waste; and 
are like a force that propagates itself for ever, chang- 
ing its place, but not losing its intensity. In short, 
there is a sense in which nothing human ever perishes ; 
nothing, at least, which proceeds from the higher and 
characteristic part of a man's nature ; nothing which 
comes of his mind and conscience ; nothing which 
he does as a subject of God's moral law. His good 
and ill lives after him, an endless blessing or a last- 
ing curse ; a consideration this which gives dignity to 
the humblest duty, and enormity to careless wrong. 
I do not now refer to the consequences of conduct in 
a future life; but to a certain perpetual and inde- 
structible influence it must have upon this world. It 



276 



NOTHING HUMAN EVER DIES. 



is a mistake to suppose that any service rendered to 
mankind, any interesting relation of human life, any 
exhibition of moral greatness, even any peculiar con- 
dition of society, can ever be lost; their form only 
disappears ; their value still remains, and their office 
is everlastingly performed. Material structures are 
dissolved, their identity and functions are gone. 
But mind partakes of the eternity of the great parent 
spirit ; and thoughts, truths, emotions, once given to 
the world, are never past ; they exist as truly, and 
perform their duty as actively, a thousand years after 
their origin, as on their day of birth. I would en- 
deavor to illustrate this in some separate instances. 

1. The acts of our individual minds are never 
lost. 

Every human deed of right or wrong fulfils two 
offices; it produces certain immediate extrinsic re- 
sults ; and it contributes to form some internal dispo- 
sition or affection. Every act of wise benevolence 
goes forth, and alleviates a suffering ; it goes within, 
and gives intenser force to the spirit of mercy. Every 
act of vindictiveness goes forth, and creates a woe ; 
it goes ivithin, and inflames the diseases of the pas- 
sions. In the one relation, it may be momentary and 
transient; in the other, irremediable and permanent. 
In the one its dealings are with pain and physical ill ; 
in the other with goodness or with guilt, and the 
solemn determinations of the human will. And in- 
asmuch as physical ill is temporary, while moral 
agencies are eternal — (for death is the end of pain, 
but where is the end of sin?) — inasmuch as a dis- 
interested and holy mind is the sure fountain of heal- 
ing and of peace, — and a heart torn by passions 
fierce or foul, is at once the seat and source of a 



NOTHING HUMAN EVER DIES. 277 

thousand miseries, — no particular natural good or 
evil can be compared in importance with the eternal 
distinctions between right and wrong; nor any 
effect of an action be ranked in magnitude with its 
influence on human affections and character. The 
great office of virtue (we are told) is to bless man- 
kind ; very well, but then the greatest blessing is in 
the increase of virtue. The essential character then 
of every choice we make is to be found in its ten- 
dency to promote or to impair the purity and good 
order, the generosity and moral dignity of the mind; 
and this element of our actions can never die ; but 
survives in our present selves, more truly than the 
juices of the soil in the leaves and blossoms of a tree. 
Such as we are, we are the offspring of the past; 
* the child is father to the man ; ' our present char- 
acters are the result of all that we have desired and 
done ; every deed has contributed something to the 
structure, and exists there as literally as the stone in 
the pyramid on whose courses it was once laid. The 
action of the moral agent does not consist in the con- 
traction of a muscle or the movement of a limb, — 
and this is all that is really transitory, — but in the 
dispositions of the mind, which are indelible. Our 
guilt as well as our goodness, once contracted, is in- 
effaceable. No power within the circuit of God's 
providence can blot out an idea from the pages of 
the secret heart, or cancel a force of desire that has 
once gone forth. How vain then is the effort of 
thought to fly from the deed of sin, the moment it is 
finished, — the hurry of conscience to reach a place 
of greater peace, — the eager whisper of self-love that 
says, the lapse is over, and a firmer march of duty may 
be forthwith begun ! If the foul thing were cemented 
24 



278 



NOTHING HUMAN EYE It DIES. 



to the hour that witnessed its commission, you might 
escape it ; but being in the mind, you have it with 
you still, however fast you fly, and however little you 
look behind. Do you imagine that, the evil passion 
having spent its energy, you will be safer in its weak- 
ness now ? It is the falsest of all the sophistries of sin ! 
A moral impulse, unlike a physical force, is not ex- 
hausted, but augmented, by every effort it puts forth ; 
not only does it part with no portion of its power, — 
but it receives a fresh intensity. There still does it 
abide, more ready than ever to come forth and assert 
itself with strength. Every one's present mind is, in 
cruth, the standing memorial, distinct and legible to 
the eye of God, of all that he has willed in time past : 
the conduct and feelings of to-day are the resultant of 
ten thousand forces of previous volition, nor would 
any act remain the same if any one of its predeces- 
sors were withdrawn or changed. Even the silent 
and hidden currents of desire and thought leave their 
traces visible ; as waves in the deeper sea are dis- 
* covered, when the waters ebb, by the ripple-mark 
congealed upon the sand. Thus the acts of our will 
do not and cannot perish ; they then truly begin to 
live, when they are past ; for then only do they be- 
come deposits in our memory, and contributions to 
our affections; then only does their internal and 
mental history commence, and they put forth that 
viewless attraction by which, more than before, the 
heart gravitates towards good or ill. There is conso- 
lation as well as terror in this thought. No strife of 
a good heart, no performance of a kind hand, has 
been without effect. Not in vain have been the 
struggles, however trivial they seem, of our early con- 
science, the dreams of a departed enthusiasm,—- the 



NOTHING HUMAN EVEft DIES. 



279 



high ambition of our untried virtue; these things are 
with us always, even unto the end: in our colder 
maturity, even in the frosts of age, their central glow 
is with our nature secretly, and relaxes unobserved 
the binding crust of years. Perishable deeds and 
transient emotions are the materials wherewith God 
has given us to build up the eternal character; and 
to raise the tower by which we escape the floods of 
death, and, with no impious intent, climb the man- 
sions of the skies. Steadily must the structure rise, 
like the walls of the persecuted Jerusalem of old, at 
which some toiled while others watched. Unceas- 
ingly we must build; parched, it may be, beneath the 
sultry sun, faint and sinking but for draught from 
the ' wells of salvation ; ' on the side of the desert, it 
may be, where we should shudder at the tempest's 
moan, but for sweet songs of Zion that float to us 
from within ; — exposed, it may be, to treacherous 
and banded foes, whose surprises would terrify, but 
for the trusty weapon and the well-trained arm; — at 
midnight and alone, it may be, cheerless, but for the 
eyes of Heaven that look upon our toil, and the 
streaks of the East, which promise us a day-spring. 
Ye must build, over the valley and on the rock, till a 
wall of impregnable protection is thrown around the 
sanctuary within, and in securest peace ye can go in 
and out the temple of God's spirit ; — 'which temple 
ye are.' 

2. The social and domestic relations whose loss 
we mourn do not really perish, when they seem to 
die. 

Those relations, it is needless to say, do not con- 
sist in the mere juxtaposition of so many human 
beings. A certain xiumber of animal lives, that are of 



280 



NOTHING HUMAN EVER DIES. 



prescribed ages, that eat and drink together, and that 
sleep under the same roof, by no means make a 
family. Almost as well might we say, that it is the 
bricks of a house that make a home. There may be 
a home in the forest or the wilderness; and there 
may be a family, with all its best blessings, though 
half its members may be in foreign lands or in an- 
other world. It is the gentle memories, the mutual 
thought, the desire to bless, the sympathies that meet 
when duties are apart, the fervor of the parent's 
prayers, the persuasion of filial love, the sister's pride 
and the brother's benediction, that constitute the true 
elements of domestic life, and sanctify the dwellings 
of our birth. Abolish the sentiments which pervade 
and animate the machinery and movements of our 
social being, and their whole value obviously disap- 
pears. The objects of affection are nothing to us but 
for the affection which they excite ; it is for this that 
they exist; this removed, their, relation loses its 
identity; this preserved, it undergoes no essential 
change. Friends are assigned to us for the sake of 
friendship; and homes for the sake of love; and while 
they perform these offices in our hearts, in essence 
and in spirit, they are with us still. The very tears 
we shed over their loss are proofs that they are not 
lost; for what is grief, but love itself restricted to 
acts of memory and longing for its other tasks, — im- 
prisoned in the past, and striving vainly to be free ? 
The cold hearts that never deeply mourn lose noth- 
ing, for they have no stake to lose ; the genial souls, 
that deem it no shame to weep, give evidence that 
they have, fresh and living still, the sympathies, to 
nurture which our human ties are closely drawn. 
God only lends us the objects of our affection ; the 



NOTHING HUMAN EVER DIES. 



281 



affection itself he gives us in perpetuity. In this best 
sense, instances are not rare in which the friend or the 
parent then first begins to live for us, when death has 
withdrawn him from our eyes,- and given him over 
exclusively to our hearts ; at least I have known a 
mother among the sainted blest, sway the will of a 
thoughtful child far more than her living voice ; brood 
with a kind of serene omnipresence over his affec- 
tions ; and sanctify his passing thought by the mild 
vigilance of her pure and loving eye. And what bet- 
ter life for him could she have than this ? Nay, 
standing as each man does in the centre of a wide 
circumference of social influences, recipient as he is of 
innumerable impressions from the mighty human 
heart, his inward being may be justly said to consist 
far more in others' lives than in his own ; without 
them and alone, he would have missed the greater 
part of the thoughts and emotions which make up 
his existence ; and when he dies, he carries away 
their life rather than his own. He dwells still below 
within their minds ; their image in his soul (which 
perhaps is the best element of their being) passes 
away to the world incorruptible above. 

3. All that is noble in the world's past history, 
and especially the minds of the great and good, are 
in like manner never lost. 

The true records of mankind, the human annals of 
the earth, are not to be found in the changes of geo- 
graphical names, in the shifting boundaries of do- 
minion, in the travels and adventures of the baubles 
of royalty, or even in the undulations of the greater 
and lesser waves of population. We have learned 
nothing, till we have penetrated far beyond these 
casual and external changes, which are of interest 
24* 



282 



NOTHING HUMAN EVER DIES. 



only as the effect and symptoms of the great mental 
vicissitudes of our race. History is an account of the 
past experience of humanity ; and this, like the life 
of the individual, consists in the ideas and sentiments, 
the deeds and passions, the truths and toils, the virtues 
and the guilt, of the mind and heart within. We 
have a deep concern in preserving from destruction 
the thoughts of the past, the leading conceptions of 
all remarkable forms of civilization ; the achievements 
of genius, of virtue, and of high faith. And in this, 
nothing can disappoint us : for though these things 
may be individually forgotten, collectively they sur- 
vive, and are in action still. All the past ages of the 
world were necessary to the formation of the present ; 
they are essential ingredients in the events that occur 
daily before our eyes. There is no period so ancient, 
no country so remote, that it could be cancelled with- 
out producing a present shock upon the earth. One 
layer of time has Providence piled up upon an- 
other for immemorial ages ; we that live stand now 
upon this ' great mountain of the Lord ; ' were the 
strata below removed, the fabric and ourselves would 
fall into ruins. Had Greece, or Rome, or Palestine 
been other than they were, Christianity could not 
have been what it is ; had Romanism been different, 
Protestantism could not have been the same, and we 
might not have been here this day. The separate 
civilizations of past centuries may be of colors 
singly indiscernible ; but in truth they are prismatic 
rays which, united, form our present light. And do 
we look back on the great and good, lamenting that 
they are gone? Do we bend in commemorative rev- 
erence before them, and wish that our lot had been 
cast in their better days ? What is the peculiar 



NOTHING HUMAN EVER DIES. 



283 



function which Heaven assigns to such minds, when 
tenants of our earth ? Have the great and good any 
nobler office than to touch the human heart with deep 
veneration for greatness and goodness ? To kindle 
in the understanding the light of more glorious con- 
ceptions, and in the conscience the fires of a holier 
virtue ? And that we grieve for their departure, and 
invoke their names, is proof that they are performing 
such blessed office still, — that this, their highest life 
for others, compared with which their personal agency 
is nothing, is not extinct Indeed, God has so framed 
our memory, that it is the infirmities of noble souls 
that chiefly fall into the shadows of the past ; while 
whatever is fair and excellent in their lives, comes 
forth from the gloom in ideal beauty, and leads us 
on through the wilds and mazes of our mortal way. 
Nor does the retrospect, thus glorified, deceive us by 
any fallacy; for things present with us we com- 
prehend far less completely, and appreciate less im- 
partially, than things past. Nothing can become a 
clear object of our thought, while we ourselves are in 
it ; we understand not our childhood, till we have left 
it ; our youth, till it has departed ; our life itself, till it 
verges to its close ; or to the majesty of genius and 
holiness, till we look back on them as fled. Each 
portion of our human experience becomes in succes- 
sion intelligible to us, as we quit it for a new T point 
of view. God has stationed us at the intersecting 
line between the known and the unknown ; he has 
planted us on a floating island of mystery, from which 
we survey the expanse behind in the clear light of 
experience and truth, and cleave the waves, invisible, 
yet ever breaking, of the unbounded future. Our very 
progress, which is our peculiar glory, consists in at 



284 



NOTHING HUJI1N EYES DIES. 



once losing and learning the past ; in gaining fresh 
stations from which to take a wider retrospect, and 
become more deeply aware of the treasures we have 
used. We are never so conscious of the succession 
of blessings which God's providence has heaped on 
us, as when lamenting the lapse of years ; and are 
then richest in the fruits of time, when mourning that 
time steals those fruits away. 



ENDEAVOURS 

AFTER THE 

CHRISTIAN LIFE. 



SECOND SERIES. 



TO 

REV. JOHN HAMILTON THOM, 

THIS VOLUME, 
THE EXPRESSION OF A HEART 
ENLARGED BY HIS FRIENDSHIP 
AND OFTEN AIDED BY HIS WISDOM, 
IS DEDICATED, 
IN MEMORY OF 
MANY LABORS LIGHTENED BY PARTNERSHIP. 
PURPOSES INVIGORATED BY SYMPATHY, 
AND THE VICISSITUDES OF YEARS 
BALANCED BY 
CONSTANCY OF AFFECTION. 



PREFACE TO SECOND SERIES. 



A glance at the contents of this Volume will show that 
it does not fulfil the intentions avowed in the preface to the 
former volume. It does not refer specially to the Ministry 
of Christ, or to the Pauline gospel ; much less does it pre- 
tend to investigate the proper definition of Christianity. 
The hope of treating these subjects, in a manner at all 
suitable to my estimate of them, still recedes into the dis- 
tance. The materials indeed are not wholly unprovided ; 
or I should not have ventured on the pledge which still 
waits to be redeemed ; but a growing sense of their inade- 
quacy makes me wonder that I could ever think them 
worthy of my reader's acceptance ; and induces me to with- 
hold them, till the deficiencies can be in some measure 
supplied. Should the needful leisure never arrive, or 
should I finally esteem myself not qualified for the task to 
which, perhaps with presumptuous earnestness, I once 
aspired, I shall indeed regret my inconsiderate promise, 
but be clear of reproach for less considerate performance. 

Though however the present volume, like its predecessor, 
is altogether practical and unsystematic, there is a sense in 
which it may be regarded as a step towards the completion 
of the original design. The prevalent differences of belief 
on questions of theology have their secret foundation in dif- 
ferent philosophies of religion ; and these philosophies are 
the product of moral experience and self-scrutiny, so as 
always to reflect the conception of human nature most 
familiar to the disciple's mind. Hence, controversies ap- 



vi 



PREFACE TO SECOND SERIES. 



parently historical cannot be settled by appeal to history 
alone ; no metaphysical disputes, by metaphysics only ; but 
will ultimately resort for their answer to the sentiments and 
affections wakened into predominant activity by the litera- 
ture, the teachings and the social condition of the age. No 
one can observe the changes of faith and the causes which 
determine them, without discovering that the order of fact 
reverses the order of theory ; that the feelings of men must 
be changed in detail, their perceptions be awakened in fresh 
directions, their tastes be drawn by new admirations, before 
any reasoning can avail to establish an altered system of 
religious thought. "Who can suppose that the different 
estimates made of the authority of Scripture are really the 
result of historical research, and are simply so many varieties 
of critical judgment ? Is it not obvious that the sacred 
writings are, in every case, allowed to retain precisely the 
residue of authority which, according to the believer's view 
of our nature and our life, is unsupplied from any other 
source ? If this be so, the psychology of religion must have 
precedence, — I do not say in dignity, but in time, — of its 
documentary criticism ; and every word faithfully spoken 
from the consciousness of a living man contributes a prelimi- 
nary to the inquiry as to the inspiration of ancient books. 
I am not ashamed to confess, that extensive and, in the end, 
systematic changes in the opinions I derived from sect and 
education, have had no higher origin than self-examina- 
tion and reflection, — a more careful interrogation of that 
internal experience, of which the superficial interpretation is 
so seductive to indolence and so prolific in error. And pos- 
sibly, a volume like the present, should it at all awaken in 
others the sentiments from which it proceeds in myself, may 
indirectly lead to the recognition, on their proper .evidence 
of consciousness, of those very truths, which in a more 
systematic work, I could only aim to protect from the ob- 
jections of philosophy, and reconcile with the results of 
criticism, 



PREFACE TO SECOND SERIES. 



vii 



I have preserved what I have to -say in its original form of 
discourses prepared for the pulpit. I have always felt indig- 
nant with those preachers who, when they resort to the press, 
seem ashamed of their vocation, and disguise, under new 
shapes and names, the materials originally embodied in 
Sermons. I should as soon think of turning a sonnet into 
an epistle, a ballad into a reveiw, or a dirge into an obituary. 
It must be a bad sermon that can be made into a good 
treatise, or even a good ' Oration.' In virtue of the close 
affinity, perhaps ultimate identity, of Religion and Poetry, 
preaching is essentially a lyric expression of the soul, an 
utterance of meditation in sorrow, hope, love, and joy, from 
a representative of the human heart in its divine relations. 
In proportion as we quit this view, and prominently intro- 
duce the idea of a preceptive and monitory function, we 
retreat from the true prophetic interpretation of the office 
back into the old sacerdotal ; — or (what is not perhaps so 
different a distinction as it may appear) from the properly 
religious to the simply moral. A. ministry of mere instruc- 
tion and persuasion, which addresses itself primarily to the 
Understanding and the Will, which deals mainly with facts 
and reasonings, with hopes and fears, may furnish us with 
the expositions of the lecture-room, the commandments of 
the altar, the casuistry of the confessional ; but it falls short 
of that true ' testimony of God,' that personal effusion of • 
conscience and affection, which distinguishes the reformed 
preaching from the catholic homily. Were this distinction 
duly apprehended, there would be a less eager demand for 
extemporaneous preaching ; which may be the vehicle of 
admirable disquisitions, convincing arguments, impressive 
speeches ; but is as little likely to produce a genuine Ser- 
mon, as the practice of improvising to produce a great poem. 
The thoughts and aspirations wnich look direct to God, and 
the kindling of which among a fraternity of men constitutes 
social worship, are natives of solitude ; 'the spectacle of an 
assembly is a hindrance to their occurrence ; and though, 



viii 



PREFACE TO SECOND SERIES. 



where they have been devoutly set down beforehand, they 
may be re-assumed under such obstacle, they would not 
spontaneously rise, till the presence of a multitude was for- 
gotten, and by a rare effort of abstraction the loneliness of 
the spirit was restored. The faculty of fluent speech is no 
doubt worthy of cultivation for various civic and moral ends ; 
but if it were once adopted as the instrument of preaching, 
I am persuaded that the pulpit would exercise a far lower, 
though perhaps a wider, influence ; would be a powerful 
agent of theological discussion, of social criticism, of moral 
and political censorship, but would lose its noblest element 
of religion. The devout genius of England would have 
occasion deeply to lament a change, which would reduce to 
the same class with the newspaper article a form of composi- 
tion, enabling us to rank the names of Taylor, Barrow, 
Leighton, Butler, with the poets and philosophers of our 
country. At all events, he who finds room, under the con- 
ditions of the Sermon, to interest and engage his whole soul, 
would be guilty of affectation, were he to disown the occa- 
sion which wakes up his worthiest spirit, and which, however 
narrow when measured by the capacities of other men, is 
adequate to receive his best thoughts and aspirations. I am 
therefore well content to mingle with the crowd of Sermon- 
izers. 

It would be ungrateful, were I not to acknowledge, as one 
of the results of the former volume of this work, the delight- 
ful and unsought-for intercourse it has opened to me with 
persons, whom it is an honor to know, of various religious 
denominations. In the divided state of English society, a 
work which touches any springs of religious affection com- 
mon to several classes, performs at least a seasonable, though 
very simple and natural, office. It is happily an office which 
every day renders easier to earnest men. For there is un- 
doubtedly an increasing body of persons in this country, 
who are rapidly escaping from the restraints of sects ; who 
are not unaware of the new conditions under which the 



PREFACE TO SECOND SERIES. 



ix 



Christianity of the present day exists ; and who are ready 
to join hand and heart in order to give free scope to the 
essential truths and influences of our religion, in combina- 
tion with the manly exercise of thought, and just conces- 
sions to modern knowledge. To find one's-self in sympathy 
with such men is a heartfelt privilege, superior to all personal 
distinction ; it is to share in an escape from the worst preju- 
dices of the present, and in the best auguries of the coming 
age. 



CONTENTS OF SECOND SERIES. 



PAGE 

XXIII. WHERE IS THY GOD? 285 

XXIV. THE SORROW WITH DOWNWARD LOOK . . . 300 
XXV. THE SHADOW OF DEATH 312 

XXVI. GREAT HOPES FOR GREAT SOULS . 324 

XXVII. LO ! GOD IS HERE 336 

XXVIII. CHRISTIAN SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS .... 349 
XXIX. THE UNCLOUDED HEART . . . . . .364 

XXX. HELP THOU MINE UNBELIEF ! .... 380 

XXXI. HAVING, DOING, AND BEING 390 

XXXII. THE FREE-MAN OF CHRIST 404 

XXXIII. THE GOOD SOLDIER OF JESUS CHRIST . . . 416 

XXXIV. THE REALM OF ORDER 429 

XXXV. THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF MERIT .... 440 

XXXVI. THE CHILD'S THOUGHT . . ' . . . 452 

XXXVII. LOOKING UP, AND LIFTING UP . . . . . 466 
XXXVIII. THE CHRISTIAN TIME-VIEW 479 

XXXIX. THE FAMILY IN HEAVEN AND EARTH .... 492 

XL. THE SINGLE AND THE EVIL EYE .... 504 

XLI. THE SEVEN SLEEPERS 516 

XLII. THE SPHERE OF SILENCE. — I. MAN'S . . . 529 

XL1II. TnE SPHERE OF SILENCE. — II. GOd's. . . . 540 



XXIII. 



WHERE IS THY GOD? 

EZEKIEL VIII. 10-12. 

SO I WENT IN AND SAW; AND BEHOLD EVERT FORM OF CREEPING 
THINGS AND ABOMINABLE BEASTS, AND ALL THE IDOLS OF THE 
HOUSE OF ISRAEL, PORTRAYED UPON THE WALLS ROUND ABOUT ; 
AND THERE STOOD BEFORE THEM SEVENTY MEN OF THE HOUSE OF 

ISRAEL, WITH EVERY MAN HIS CENSER IN HIS HAND; AND A 

THICK CLOUD OF INCENSE WENT UP. THEN SAID HE UNTO ME, 
SON OF MAN, HAST THOU SEEN WHAT THE ANCIENTS OF THE 
HOUSE OF ISRAEL DO IN THE DARK, EVERY MAN IN THE CHAM- 
BERS OF HIS IMAGERY? 

To a wise man there is no surer mark of decline 
in the spirit of a people, than the corruption of their 
language,, and the loss of meaning from their highest 
and most sacred words. In the affairs of govern- 
ment, of morals, of divinity, we retain the phrases 
used by our forefathers in Shakespeare's time; but it 
is impossible to notice the dwindled thought which 
they frequently contain, without feeling that the 
currency struck for the commerce of giant souls has 
been clipped to serve the traffic of dwarfs. Observe, 
for example, the lowered meaning of the word Re- 
ligion. If you ask, in these days, what a man's 
religion is, you are told something about the place 
he goes to on a Sunday, or the preacher he objects to 
least; of his likings and dislikings, his habits and 
opinions, his conventional professions. But who, 



286 



WHERE IS THY GOD ? 



from all this, would draw any inference as to his 
character ? You know, where to find him, and how 
he looks; but have obtained no insight into what he 
is. Yet can it be doubted that if we knew his reli- 
gion in the true and ancient sense, we should under- 
stand him perfectly ? — should see him as God alone 
can see him now, stripped of the disguises that hide 
him even from himself, and with the vital pulse itself 
of thought and act laid bare to view ? The divine 
Omniscience, in relation to our nature, may be said 
to consist in nothing else than a discernment of our 
several religions. Not indeed that in his infinite 
Reason he knows anything about Churchmen, and 
Methodists, and Quakers ; or distinguishes the silent 
meeting from the organ's pomp ; or takes account of 
vestments black or white. These things only denote 
what a man will call himself when he is asked: they 
refer, even when most sincere, to nothing that has 
necessarily any deep seat within the character; only 
to certain emblems, either in conception or in out- 
ward habit, adopted for the expression of affections 
the most various in direction and intensity. But 
whoever can so look into my heart as to tell whether 
there is anything which I revere; and, if there be, 
what thing it is ; he may read me through and 
through, and there is no darkness wherein I may 
hide myself. This is the master-key to the whole 
moral nature; what does a man secretly admire and 
worship ? What haunts him with the deepest won- 
der? What fills him with most earnest aspiration? 
What should we overhear in the soliloquies of his 
unguarded mind? This it is which, in the truth of 
things, constitutes his religion; — this, which deter- 
mines his precise place in the scale of spiritual ranks ; 



WHERE IS THY GOD ? 



287 



— this, which allies him to Hell or Heaven; — this, 
which makes him the outcast or the accepted of the 
moral sentiments of the Holiest. Every man's high- 
est, nameless though it be, is his 'living God: 1 while, 
oftener than we can tell, the being on whom he 
seems to call, whose history he learned in the cate- 
chism, of whom he hears at church, — with open ear 
perhaps, but with thick deaf soul, — is his dead God. 
It is the former of these that gives me his genuine 
characteristic: that uppermost term in his mind dis- 
closes all the rest. Lift me the veil that hides the 
penetralia of his worship, let me see the genuflexions 
of his spirit, and catch the whiff of his incense, and 
look in the face the image at whose feet he is pros- 
trate; and thenceforth I know him well; can tell 
where to find him in the world ; and divine the tem- 
per of his home. The classifications produced by 
this principle are not what you will meet with in any 
1 Sketch of all religions.' Their lines run across the 
divisions of historical sects, wholly regardless of their 
separations ; but as they are drawn by the hand of 
nature and of conscience, rather than by that of 
pedants and of bigots, to study them is to gain in- 
sight into divine truth, instead of wandering through 
the catalogue of human errors. Let us endeavor then 
to distinguish between real and pretended religion, 
by adverting to the several chief aims that manifestly 
preside over human life. 

Of many a man you would never hesitate to say, 
that his chief aim was to obtain ease, or wealth, or 
dignity. These are the objects manifestly in front of 
him, and, like some huge magnetic mass, drawing his 
whole nature towards them. The fact is apparent, 
not altogether from the amount of time which he 



28S 



WHERE IS THY GOD ? 



devotes to them; for often the thing dearest and most 
sacred to the heart may fill the fewest moments, and, 
though pervading the whole spirit, may scarcely touch 
the matter, of our days; nor even from the topics of 
his talk ; for there are those who, in conversation, 
seek rather to learn what is most foreign to them, 
than to speak what is most native ; but from cer- 
tain slight though expressive symptoms, hard to 
describe in detail, yet not easily missed in their com- 
bination. The engagements to which he takes with 
the heartiest relish, the sentiments that raise his 
quickest response, the occasions that visibly call him 
out and shake him free, the moments of his brighten- 
ing eye, and genial laugh, and flowing voice, leave 
on us an irresistible impression of his sincerest taste s 
and deepest desires. And above all, does he reveal 
these, when we discover the persons w T ho most oc- 
cupy his thoughts ; in whom he sees what he would 
like to be or to appear, and whose lot or life he feels 
it would be an ascent to gain. Judged by signs in- 
fallible as these, how many are there, surrendered to 
a low Epicurean life! — who know no higher end 
than to be comfortable or renowned! — whose care is 
for what they may have, and not for what they might 
be! If they achieve any real work, it is only that 
they may reach its end and take their ease. If they 
do a deed of public justice, it is as much due to the 
publicity as to the justice. If they are detected in a 
charity, it is with the smallest possible mercy of heart, 
and is performed as a slothful riddance of uneasiness, 
or a creditable compliance with convention. If they 
pray not to be led into temptation, it is only the 
temptation to imprudence and social mistake ; -if to 
be delivered from evil, it is but the evil of trouble or 



WHERE IS THY GOD ? 



289 



derision. To make the largest use of men, rendering 
back the smallest amount of service, to reap the 
greatest crop from the present, and drop the scantiest 
seeds for the future, is their true problem of exist- 
ence. They never rush on toil and struggle that 
bring no price; or stretch their reason till it aches in 
search of truth ; or crucify their affections in redemp- 
tion of human wrongs ; or spend their reputation and 
their strength in rousing the public conscience from 
its sleep. Their whole faculties are apprenticed to 
themselves. Unconscious of a heaven above them 
and around, they live and die on principles purely 
mercantile; and the book of life must be a common 
ledger, if their names are written on its page. 

It is needless at present to settle the comparative 
rank of these three seducing aims ; else we might de- 
cide, perhaps, that, as a primary object of pursuit, 
ease is more ignoble, and reputation less, than wealth, 
which excites the more prevailing desire. The great 
thing to be observed is common to them all. They 
do not carry a man out of himself, or show him any- 
thing higher. He is the centre in which they all ter- 
minate ; he spins upon his own axis in the dark, in- 
effectually shaping and rounding his particular world, 
but wheeling round no glorious orb, feeling no celes- 
tial light, flushed with no colors of morn and eve, and 
barren of seasonal foliage and fruit. What is his 
habitual day-dream? What the conception that 
moves before him in secret vision, and strives for 
realization ? Is it the thought of the heroes and the 
saints of history? or of friends at his right hand, 
whose nobler spirits shame his weakness ? Is it not 
simply the image of himself easy, himself rich, himself 
grand and famous ? This one corrupting picture is 
25 



290 



WHESE IS THY GOD ? 



the substitute in him for the whole pantheon of great 
souls ; for sages, prophets, martyrs, and whatever of 
beauty and sanctity has ever dwelt in earth or 
heaven. His whole system of desires is mere per- 
sonal greed: he stands upon his own flat, without an 
aspiration. Nothing has a divine right to him, but 
he has a human appetite for all things. He wor- 
ships nothing; he serves nothing. If God were away 
and heaven were not, it would make no difference to 
him ; he would never miss them. His life is Godless ; 
he is an Atheist. 

This, in fact, is the strict and proper meaning of 
the word Atheism ; the absence from a man's mind 
of any object of worship ; so that he is left with noth- 
ing above him, and lives wholly to himself. Hence 
this term, though often applied unjustly to very 
different states of mind, is properly one of odium ; for 
it is impossible to contemplate such a condition of 
character without strong aversion; or to conceive of 
its production without a large operation of moral and 
voluntary causes. We may observe, too, that the 
effects of this irreligion are as disorganizing in so- 
ciety, as they are debasing to the individual. -It 
wholly dissolves the great tie which binds men to- 
gether, and is alone capable of forming them into a 
fraternity, — the sentiment of mutual reverence. Do 
you say, that among the servants of Wealth or of 
Fame also this sentiment has place, because he who 
has little is found to admire him who has more, and 
to wait upon him with vast humility? He does no 
such thing. He admires the lot, but cares nothing 
for the man; and this combination of positive and 
negative feelings, — aspiration after another's state 
without any love for the person in it,— is not honor, 



WHERE IS THY GOD ? 



291 



but simply envy. As for the so-called humility of the 
poor menial in this career, in the presence of his 
worldly superior, the quality has no right to a moral, 
much less to a Christian name. It is mere unmanli- 
ness arising from the failure of self-respect as well as 
of mutual reverence: human attributes are wholly 
emptied out of the relation, and human possessions 
alone remain to look one another in the face; and the 
men, losing all higher significance, are left in each 
other's presence, as two degrees of comparison in 
the vocabulary of Mammon. Nay, in many a one, 
this seeming subserviency is even worse; it is an 
admiration of himself as he is to be, and no less full 
of pride than it is of meanness. To confound this 
servility with the lowly dignity of worship, is to 
mistake the slouch of pauperism touching the hat, 
with the uplifted look of Mary sitting at the feet. 
And what kind of community would that be, whose 
moral composition was from these* two elements, uni- 
versal self-seeking, and general dearth of mutual 
reverence ? Go to the heart of the matter, and every 
man would be a centre of repulsion, held to his par- 
ticular sphere of human atoms by an external frame- 
work of precarious interests ; instead of taking his 
place in a system of natural attractions, which would 
endure though the world itself were to sink away. 

Beyond this stage of character, which I have de- 
scribed by the word Atheism, the smallest step intro- 
duces us to some form of religion. There is no 
further condition of mind, that is not marked by the 
consciousness of something spiritually higher; some- 
thing that has divine right over us ; something there- 
fore which, to say the least, stands for us in the place 
of God. Still, ere we reach the limit of pure and 



292 



■WHERE IS THY GOD ? 



perfect religion, which is that of Christ, there is an 
ample range of error and imperfection, which may be 
designated by the general name of Idolatry. This 
offence against truth is far from being an obsolete 
historical affair, that is gone out with the Old Tes- 
tament, and of no concern except to missionaries now. 
It abounds (taking the strictest and most philosophic 
meaning of the term) in every Christian land, and 
every Christian sect; though it certainly constitutes 
a partial apostasy from the true faith of Christendom. 
To make this plain, let me ask you to reflect, what is 
the real essence of Idolatry, and how we are to dis- 
tinguish it from pure religion. 

Some will affirm, that true worship addresses itself 
direct to the living God himself; appearing before 
him face to face, and discerning him as he is in his 
own nature ; while idolatry interposes, before the eye 
of the body or the mind, some image, which is not 
God, but only represents him. 

It is, however, impossible to rest the distinction 
thus, upon the absence of symbol in one case, and its 
presence in the other; for it is equally found in both, 
and is wholly indispensable to religion itself. On 
these terms, we should all (not men alone, but angels 
too) be idolaters alike. For God, being infinite, can 
never be fully comprehended by our minds; whatever 
thought of him be there, his real nature must still 
transcend ; there will yet be deep after deep beyond, 
within that light ineffable; and what we see, com- 
pared with what we do not see, will be as the rain- 
drop to the firmament. Our conception of him can 
never correspond with the reality, so as to be without 
omission, disproportion, or aberration ; but can only 
represent the reality, and stand for God within our 



WHERE IS THY GOD ? 



293 



souls, till nobler thoughts arise and reveal themselves 
as his interpreters. And this is precisely what we 
mean by a symbolical idea. The devotee, who pros- 
trates himself before a black stone ; the Egyptian, 
who in his prayers was haunted by the ideal form of 
the graceful ibis or the monstrous sphinx ; the Theist, 
who bends beneath the starry porch that midnight 
opens to the temple of the universe ; the Christian, 
who sees in heaven a spirit akin to that which divinely 
lived in Galilee, and with glorious pity died on Cal- 
vary; — all alike assume a representation of Him 
whose immeasurable nature they can neither compass 
nor escape. And the only question is, whether the 
conception they portray upon the wall of their ideal 
temple, is an abominable idol, or a true and sanctify- 
ing mediatorial thought. 

Others, who admit the necessity of representative 
ideas in Religion, will say that idolatry consists in 
making the symbol visible, while true Religion leaves 
it mental and invisible. 

Yet it could hardly be deemed impossible for a 
blind man to be an idolater; superstition and sin 
are not to be escaped through mere physical priva- 
tion. And if an image present to the mind's eye 
alone, suffices to constitute an idol, then nothing 
remains for true religion, but to think in mere ab- 
stractions; to worship, not a thinking, ruling, loving, 
holy Being, but Thought, and Power, and Love, and 
Holiness themselves ; to adore, not a divine Architect 
of creation, but the bare Skill itself of the architec- 
ture ; to avoid all approach to impersonation of divine 
attributes, and to fly, as from a sin, before the up- 
rising of a concrete and a living God. Yet, I need 
not say, this is an impossible and untenable state of 
25* 



294 



WHERE IS THY GOD ? 



mind ; the aim at it is that which constitutes a life- 
less Pantheism ; and the mere poetical contemplation 
of nature does not deepen into the adoring service 
of God, till we feel creation and life to be at the 
disposal of a present Mind, a personal and moral 
Will, with absolute love of good and perfect abhor- 
rence of evil, with distinct and self-directing activity, 
to which the laws, the order, the beauty, the scale, 
the progression, the issues of all things, are devoutly 
referred. And wherever such a faith exists, there is 
a conception in the mind, as truly representative 
and as little restrained within the limits of abstract 
thought, as the notion we may entertain of a char- 
acter in history whom we have never seen, or of an 
angel in heaven whom we cannot see. There is no 
one even, through w T hose prayers and meditations 
transient lights of beauty and floating fringes of 
imagery will not be found to pass ; nor is it in mortal 
thought otherwise to realize the majesty, the purity, 
the constancy, the tenderness of God. 

The genuine characteristic of all Idolatry, then, 
can only be found in this ; that the symbol it adopts 
in worship is a false and needlessly partial represen- 
tation of the divine nature ; . while pure Religion 
holds to one which is true and perfect, wanting of 
the reality, not in the quality of its spirit, but only in 
the scale of its dimensions. Our minds are so ill- 
proportioned, and through ignorance and evil violate 
so much the proper symmetry of a spiritual nature,- 
that, left to their own wilful ways, they misrepresent 
to us the true essence of perfection ; and many an 
image does our adoring fancy grave, and then obey, 
which cannot innocently stand in the place of God, 
and supplants a worship of diviner right. Thus, there 



WHERE IS THY GOD? 



295 



is the Philosopher's idol, shaped and set up by Intel- 
lect unsanctified of conscience. To this is attracted 
an exclusive reverence for Wisdom, Thought, and 
Skill ; the votary has learned how little is all he 
knows, and stands with serene aspiration before 
the presence of Infinite Reason ; unconscious, mean- 
while, of his children neglected at his feet, and the 
cries of humanity bleeding near him in the dust. 
There is the Artist's idol, portrayed upon the wall of 
nature with the pencil of beauty, and reflecting a 
flush of loveliness over heaven and earth. Many a 
glorious soul has bowed down before this, and been 
inspired by it to do great and wondrous things ; yet 
how often betrayed at the same time into passionate 
license, and mean peevishness ! There is the Stoic's 
idol, chiselled, by austere conscience, from the granitic 
masses of spiritual strength, and worshipped as the 
image of divine Justice, Majesty, and Holiness. This 
has won and held captive the noblest spirits that are 
not wholly Christian, and glorified them to a manli- 
ness approaching something divine ; yet wanting still 
the mellowing of pity, and the grace of sweet and 
glad affections. And there is the Woman's idol, with 
Madonna look, captivating to gentler minds ; em- 
bodying and aw r akening the reverence for Mercy and 
disinterested Love ; and, by omission, enfeebling the 
severe healthfulness of duty, and merging the strug- 
gling heroism of this life in the glorified saintship of 
another. All these are but delusive impersonations 
of separated attributes of God ; of his Intellect ; his 
creative Thought ; his Will ; his AfTectionateness. 
They are mutilated representations of his nature ; 
idols of the worshipper's heart, the serving of which 
will rather confirm and exaggerate, than remedy, the 



296 



"WHERE IS THY GOD? 



defective proportions of his soul ; elevating him in- 
deed above himself, but still leaving him below his 
powers. 

Nor is there any security against this devotion to 
idols of the mind, except that which Heaven itself 
hath furnished to all Christendom ; the reverential 
acceptance of Christ as the highest Image of the 
invisible God, the complete and finished representa- 
tion of his moral perfections. Here, nothing is 
exuberant, nothing deficient; but there prevails a 
harmony of spirit absolute and divine. In the Eter- 
nal Providence that rules us, reason can conceive, 
conscience can demand, affection can discern, nothing 
which has not its expression in the author and per- 
fecter of faith. In worshipping the combination of 
attributes, through which he has shown us the 
Father, there can be no fear that any duty will be 
forgotten, any taste corrupted, any aspiration laid 
asleep. Drawn upward by such an object, nothing 
in us can remain low and weak ; the simplicity of 
the child, the strength of the man, the love of the 
woman, the thought of the sage, the courage of the 
martyr, the elevation of the saint, the purity of the 
angel, press and strive to unite and realize themselves 
within our souls. Standing before a God, of whose 
Mind the universe, of whose Spirit the Man of Naz- 
areth is the accepted symbol, we must become, in 
proportion to the sincerity and depth of our devo- 
tion, transfigured with the divinest glory of reason 
and affection, that can rest upon a nature like ours ; 
and raised to a comprehension of that ' love of Christ 
which passeth knowledge,' our souls must not only 
attain a fairer proportion, but expand also to nobler 
dimensions, as they become 'filled with the fulness 
of God.' 



WHERE IS THY GOD ? 



297 



Thus, c to as many as receive him,' does Christ 
i give power to become sons of God.' By such wor- 
ship is the nature of the individual disciple glorified. 
And what is true of a single mind, is no less true of 
communities of men. They also have their atheisms, 
and their several idolatries ; from which too they can 
be recalled and preserved only in proportion as they 
find their principle of combination, and their mode of 
action, in the deep love and reverence of the perfect- 
ness of Christ. No age, since the reformation, has 
been so marked by idol-worship as our own ; — so 
prolific of favorite and one-sided schemes of social 
improvement, founded on the sense of some solitary 
want of human nature, but barren of good from neg- 
lect of all the rest. Our Christianity is no longer 
Catholic, rich in provisions for the whole faculties and 
being of man. With the expansion and complication 
of our life, religion has lost its comprehensive grasp 
of all the elements of our well-being, and permitted 
them to escape and break up in mischievous analysis, 
and consign themselves to separate trusts. In an- 
swer to the earnest cry of society, ' What shall we 
do to be saved from all our miseries and sins ? ' there 
are countless fragmentary answers, in place of the 
deep, full harmony of response, from the soul of 
Christian inspiration. ' Give us more bread,' says 
one ; ' more money,' says a second ; 1 more churches, 
more belief, more priests,' say others in their turn ; 
and not the least intelligent and worthy will exclaim 
for the diminution of distilleries, or the multiplication 
of schools. For my own part, I believe that human 
nature is not like a house, which you may build up 
piecemeal, — first the stone, then the wood, — to its 
true finish and proportion ; but, rather, like the lily or 



298 



"WHERE IS THY GOD ? 



the tree, which grow in all parts, — the stem, the root, 
the leaf, — at once, and keep a constant symmetry. 
It must be nourished and unfolded simultaneously in 
all its dimensions, or its enlargement is mere distor- 
tion and disease. There is truth with those who idol- 
ize the physical means of augmenting the comforts of 
the people ; but it is only the truth which lurked in 
the foul ./Egyptian adoration of the prolific powers of 
nature. There is truth with those who trust in the 
ameliorating energy of knowledge and of art ; but it 
is the truth which filled Athens with the worship of 
the wise Minerva, and which left it still, in the 
estimate of the Christian apostle, ' in all things too 
superstitious.' There is truth with those who say we 
want more faith and devout obedience ; but if the 
temple of our life be denied the light of Thought, 
then, though every man stands, saint-like, with his 
censer in his hand, he will just repeat £ what the 
elders of Israel did in the dark,' — send up his foolish 
cloud of incense before £ creeping things and abomi- 
nable beasts.' Society, to avoid corruption in any of 
these agencies, must concurrently avail itself of all. 
And there is no power, which embraces them all, and 
assigns to each its proper rank, except that divine re- 
ligion which makes Christ the model and the end of 
life. Trusting to inferior forces, we shall find that 
each is blind to all that lies above it, and provides 
for the world only up to his own level. But Chris- 
tian faith, in aiming at once at the highest elements 
of good, necessarily includes the lowest ; it contains 
within itself an epitome of all the parts of human 
perfection ; and in the heart of a nation, as of a man, 
it is the grand source of moral salubrity and inextin- 
guishable hope. In proportion as they have receded 



WH.ESE IS THY GOD ? 



299 



from this, have States and generations slipped into 
thraldom to partial theories and unworthy aims ; and 
in the devouring haste of gain, or the mad passion for 
war, or the blindness of mutual distrust, have brought 
down the weighty penalties by which Heaven recalls 
society from its unfaithfulness. But while the image 
of Christ remains as the central and holy light of 
every home, the moral delusions that waste a peo- 
ple's strength can find no place of entrance ; and 
moderate desires in private life, with a paramount 
sense of justice in the State ; — guardianship over the 
weak, with vigilance against the strong ; care of neg- 
lected childhood, reverence for lingering age, and a 
share of the willing honor for all men ; with a hearty 
homage to all truth as the reflected Light, and Duty 
as the express Law of God, must characterize and 
consolidate that happy people, from whom no cloud 
of idol incense yet hides the beauty of the Son of 
Man. 



XXIV. 



THE SORROW WITH DOWNWARD LOOK. 

Mark x. 20-22. 

and he answered and said unto him, 'master, all these things 
ha ye i observed from mt youth.' then jesus, beholding him, 
loyed him, and said unto him, 1 one thing thou lackest ; go 
thy way, sell whatsoever thou hast, and giye to the poor, 
and thou shalt have treasure in heaven | and come, take 
up the cross, and follow me.' and he was sad at that say- 
ing, and went away grieved ; for he had great possessions. 

What made this young man retire in sorrow from 
before the face of Christ ? That the demand made 
upon him was quite irrational, all political econo- 
mists would confidentially assure him. That he had 
every reason to be satisfied with a life so pure and 
orderly, would be declared by every worthy neighbor, 
and all judicious divines. And if he carried home 
with him any traces of the sadness with which he 
turned from the eye of Jesus, no doubt he was 
cheered up, as far as might be, by the loving- rebukes 
of wife or friends, chiding his misgivings, and laugh- 
ing his thoughtfulness away. If a man who keeps all 
the commandments may not be happy, who may ? 
"With a memory clear of reproach from the youth 
up, whence can he have drawn the cloud to shade so 
innocent a soul ? All the sources of inward care and 
conflict seem to be excluded here ; and we appear to 
have the perfect representative of a life at peace. To 



THE SORROW WITH DOWNWARD LOOK. 301 

say nothing of the ruler's property, which was ample 
for external comfort, he had fulfilled the one grand 
requisite of moral contentment and repose ; he had 
established a harmony between his perceptions and 
his actions, and framed his mode of conduct by his 
sentiments of right. Now there is, apparently, no 
other condition of inward peace than this. All men 
feel the worth of the spiritual affections that solicit 
them, and revere the obligation of the better to ex- 
clude the worse. All men feel also the comparative 
strength of these same affections, and find in some a 
power which others ineffectually dispute. Wherever 
the order of strength agrees exactly with the order of 
worth ; and wherever the desire known to be the 
highest, is also the most intense, and no brute pas- 
sion usurps the throne instead of serving as the 
footstool ; wherever the habits are shaped and pro- 
portioned by the scale of excellence and beauty 
within ; there, strife and sorrow cannot be ; there, 
is the glad consent between hand and heart, the 
concord between our worship and our will, which 
charms away the approach of care. This harmony 
may be obtained in either of two ways ; by tuning 
up the life to the key-note of thought ; or by letting 
down the thought to the pitch of the actual life. He 
who will persistently follow his highest impulses and 
convictions, who will trust only these amid noisier 
claims, and constrain himself to go with them alike 
in their faintness and their might, shall not find his 
struggle everlasting; his wrestlings shall become fewer 
and less terrible ; the hand of God, so dim to him 
and doubtful at the first, shall in the end be the only 
thing that is clear and sure ; his best shall be his 
strongest too. But this, which is a holy peace, is not 
26 



302 



THE SORROW WITH DOWNWARD LOOK. 



the only rest open to the contradictions of our nature. 
There is also an escape from discord, by an inverse 
and descending path. And if a man will steadily 
follow his strongest impulses, without regard to their 
vileness or their worth, will give no heed to any 
whispering compunction, will do only and always 
what he likes ; from him, too, the jarring and conflict 
of nature shall pass away; God's spirit will not 
always strive with him, to turn his wilful steps ; the 
angels that beset his path with entreaty, with protest, 
with defiance, will thin off till they are seen no more ; he 
will enjoy a cheerful and comfortable exemption from 
anything divine ; and, by withdrawal of all else, his 
strongest affections will become his best. So far as 
mere ease and pleasure are concerned, there is not 
perhaps much to choose between these two opposite 
modes of self-reconciliation. If a man resolves to dis- 
own the upper region of his nature, he may find 
entertainment, if that be all, in the lower ; and care 
may be made to fly before the gas-lamps and merri- 
ment of the vault, as well as beneath the starlight of 
the observatory and the silence of the skies. The 
difference is not sentient but moral ; between the har- 
monies of the world above, and the enchantments of 
Circe's isle ; the one a music straying from the gate 
of Heaven, and waking the soul to share the vigils of 
immortals ; the other, composing it to sleep upon the 
verge of hell. It was, however, in the nobler way that 
the young man in the text had established his right 
to an unanxious life, and attracted the love of Christ; 
he had conformed his habits to his moral sense, not 
sunk his moral sense to the level of his habits. What 
then had happened to disturb the rest arising from 
their concord ? 



THE SORROW WITH DOWNWARD LOOK. 



303 



The truth is, this young ruler had had all the con- 
tent that noble minds can derive from the order of 
a well-regulated life. He had come to the end of 
all such satisfactions, and found them fairly spent. 
They had become 4o him mere negative conditions of 
repose, without which indeed he would sink into self- 
contempt ; but with which he rose into no self- 
reverence, and scarce escaped the haunting of a 
perpetual penitence. He felt tlfat if this were all, — 
this, which was but the native path and beaten track 
of his soul, — the field of duty was no such glorious 
thing ; and some diviner terms might have been 
asked, ere this flat earth should win eternal life. 
A store of unexhausted power, a pressure towards 
loftier aspiration, led him to fix an eager eye on 
Christ, and be ready for intenser work ; and to be 
referred only to the old commands, and sent back to 
the familiar task, spread the dull shade over his heart 
again. He had reached the stage of character, which 
all men, as they are more faithful, the sooner reach, 
when the conscience breaks out beyond the life, and 
demands a sphere of enterprise larger than the home 
domain with all its settled ways. There is, there 
can be, no list of actions, no scheme of habits, that 
will permanently represent your duty, and stand as a 
perpetual diagram of right. Only while it is yet unreal- 
ized, while it rises ideally above you, and reproaches 
your slurred and broken lines of order, is it truly 
the emblem of your obligations ; the moment you 
overtake it, and fall into coincidence with it, its func- 
tion is gone, and it guides and teaches you no more ; 
it becomes simply what you a?'e, which is always 
parted by an interval from what you ought to be. 
Moral excellence is a state of the affections, and must 



304 THE SORROW WITH DOWNWARD LOOK. 

be measured by their purity and depth ; and in doing 
merely what is habitual, the affections cannot keep 
awake ; they live upon fresh thoughts, and demand 
ever new toils ; their eye is intent upon the future, 
drawn thither by a holy light ; and if once it retires 
upon the present, it droops into a fatal sleep. Obedi-. 
ence to a perfect God can be nothing less than a ser- 
vice constantly rendered by the will; a voluntary 
effort, given largely and ungrudgingly in proportion 
to the gratefulness and magnanimity of the soul, and 
not therefore stinted in the angel, while it is lavished 
in the man. But from all that is customary the living 
forces of the will retire ; achieving ease, it loses sanc- 
tity ; it is a slain victim, acceptable to-day, unclean 
to-morrow ; for God will have at his altar the very 
breath and blood of life, and not alone its shape and 
shell. 

And so it is, that there is something truly infinite 
in duty ; it is a region that can never be inclosed ; 
we pitch our tent upon its boundary field, and as we 
survey it, we detect an ampler realm beyond. As the 
body could, by no far travelling, find a station where 
the arm might not yet be stretched forth ; so the soul 
can be borne by no progress to a point where the 
freewill shall not take another step. Hence it is evi- 
dent that, in the mind of all responsible beings, there 
must be a perpetual alternation between two opposite 
states, of rest and unrest, succeeding and reproducing 
each other. While the moral conceptions are in clear 
advance of the actions, there is a secret shame which 
forbids repose ; a sense of sorrowful aspiration impels 
the will to earnest effort, and sends it panting after 
the divine form that invites it on. At length Faith 
and Resolution overtake the image ; the interval is 



THE SORROW WITH DOWNWARD LOOK. 



305 



conquered, and that which was a vision in the past 
is a reality of the present; the outer and the inner 
life concur; and for awhile the healthy joy of a good 
conscience touches the features with its light. But, 
in this absence of moral confusion, and under the 
shelter of a sacred peace, the energies of a pure 
mind, released from severer action, push forward to 
the seizure of higher thoughts. The conscience, 
wounded and bleeding no more, and cherished by 
the healthful air of God's approval, is sure to open 
into nobler dimensions. In truth, it is the chief good 
of a well ordered structure of habits, that it protects 
the living soul within, frees it from mean dangers, 
and gives it leave to grow. And so the sentiments 
of duty bursts from their confinement, and leave the 
life again behind ; restoring the spirit to its strife, till 
the intolerable chasm be traversed as before. 

This systole and diastole of the moral nature is as 
truly needful to its vital action, as the pulsations of 
the heart to our physical existence. Only, their pe- 
riod is indefinitely various, from a moment to a life. 
Some men you may find, whose habits and whose 
conscience settle down in fixed partnership for this 
world, and are never seen diverging ; not, alas ! from 
the agility of their habits, but from the sluggishness 
of their conscience. Their moral perceptions are ab- 
solutely stationary, or show them even less of heaven 
in their manhood than in their youth. Doing what 
they think right, and thinking nothing right but what 
they do, they approve themselves and look up to 
nothing. They are not, however, exempt from the 
great law of alternation ; only its oscillation is dull 
and slow ; and its sweep of rest having occupied this 
life, its sorrowful return must begin another. In 
26* 



308 THE SOREOAY WITH DOWNWARD LOOK. 

nobler men, the period of the soul is quicker; for 
awhile, they fulfil their moral aims, and after con- 
quest enjoy the victory ; they pitch their tent upon 
the field, and, not without a glad thanksgiving, ac- 
cept a brief repose. But high hearts are never long 
without hearing some new call, some distant clarion 
of God, even in their dreams ; and soon they are 
observed to break up the camp of ease, and start on 
some fresh march of faithful service. And to such 
prod active wills the era of the rest, like the Creator's 
sabbath, is but as a sixth, — and that all filled with 
hallowed hours, — to the working days whose morn- 
ing and evening enclose and reclaim some realm of 
beauty out of chaos. And finally, looking higher 
still, we find those who never wait till their moral 
work accumulates, and who reward resolution with 
no rest ; with whom therefore the alternation is in- 
stantaneous and constant ; who do the good only to 
see the better, and see the better only to achieve it ; 
who are too meek for transport, too faithful for re- 
morse, too earnest for repose ; whose worship is ac- 
tion, and whose action ceaseless aspiration. 

This last case, in which the law of alternation has 
its period reduced to a vanishing interval, fulfils our 
conception of an angel-mind. To higher natures it 
belongs to have nothing discordant, nothing inter- 
mittent ; their thought ever advancing, their will 
never lingering, the disturbance between them is 
annihilated as fast as it is created ; and with activity 
more glorious than ours, they substitute for our 
human periodicity a diviner constancy. If, as the 
prophet's dream proclaims, there is ' no night ' in the 
better world, the scene, unshaded by the darkness, 
unkindled by the blaze of day, is the fitting residence 



THE SORROW WITH DOWNWARD LOOK. 



307 



for beings exempt from the ebb and flow of energy 
and repose ; who have no morning and evening sacri- 
fice, but from whose fragrant and fervent mind the 
cloud of incense eternally ascends ; whose affections 
send forth no interrupted anthem, but in ever-living 
harmony continually cry, ' Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord 
God Almighty, who art, and wast, and art to come. 5 
This characteristic in our conception of more heaven- 
ly natures presents them to us under an aspect of 
intent, yet passionless, serenity. We attribute to 
them a perfect moral beauty, a godlike symmetry of 
goodness, which fills us with reverence, trust, affec- 
tion, which draws from us the sigh of hope, and 
refreshes us in the weariness of our harsher life. But 
we ascribe to them no merit ; we desire for them no 
reward ; no plaudits burst from our hearts as we 
meditate, their high career. As soon almost should 
we think of applauding the perfectness of God. A 
spirit that undergoes no struggle is out of the sphere 
of recompense ; being either below the point of noble 
strife, so as not to deserve reward ; or above, so as 
not to need it. The perfect proportion between 
power and perception, which we recognize in diviner 
natures, excludes all idea of resistance ; there is no 
hesitation for volition to encounter ; whatever is felt 
to be best is also loved as dearest, and simply pur- 
sued without a rival in the thoughts. This entire 
coalescence of the order of goodness and the order 
of desire ; this instant and spontaneous adaptation 
of the Will to the Conscience through every stage 
of moral progression, distinguishes our notion of 
saintly excellence, and furnishes our clearest image 
of a higher world. 

The conditions of this world, however, are of a 



308 



THE SORROW WITH DOWNWARD LOOK. 



lower and less glorious kind. We must rise by suc- 
cessive stages, not by perennial flight. We have 
always something to overtake ; and there is a dis- 
tance but too appreciable, between what we are and 
what we ought to be, — between what we wish and 
what we reverence. This distance can be recovered 
only by successive paroxysms of effort, prolonged 
into patient perseverance. We cannot hope to be 
released from this demand upon our half-reluctant 
powers, and must hold ourselves ready, with resolute 
denial, now to lash and now to cheer them on. 
When we have fairly won a point, and brought up 
our-habit to our conscience, the penitential interval, 
destroyed for the moment, instantly begins to grow 
again. For, while action, breathless with successful 
toil, sits down to rest, affection, which has long been 
there, is moving on. While our moral love is ever 
in the future, our will becomes entangled in the past; 
detained by clinging habits and lulled by old con- 
tentments, it sleeps upon its triumphs till it is sur- 
prised by sudden foes. Every new perception of 
good, every dawning upon us of higher obligations, 
finds our active forces pledged and pre-engaged to 
some poorer work, from which we have to tear our- 
selves away. This it is that makes all human faith- 
lessness not holy but strenuous, and constitutes the 
difference between the saint and the hero. In pro- 
portion to the resistance which is felt, and the effort 
set up against it, in proportion to the strength of 
natural desire which is put aside for its inferior 
worth, is the virtue admitted to be noble and heroic; 
we praise it with a glad and glorious heart ; we 
celebrate it as a triumph ; and cry, — what we could 
never say to angel or to God, — 1 Well done!' The 



THE SORROW WITH DOWNWARD LOOK. 309 

sentiment seems to imply that the achievement is 
something more than could be expected. But if 
such crisis of conflict comes to ourselves, we know 
well that it is not in our option to shrink from it 
with innocence; that to discern a moral good as 
possible, is to come under the obligation to make it 
real. And if the effort is faithlessly declined, there 
inevitably creeps upon us, first, an ignominious sor- 
row ; and next, a sadder and more fatal loss of the 
sorrow, and of all true worship of the heart. 

This first grief it was that took the young ruler 
with mournful steps away; and an anticipation of 
the second that led Jesus to look on him with a 
boundless pity. Christ saw in him the soul, which, 
if it could but be the hero, would become the angel ; 
if not, would sink, with many an ineffectual horror, 
into infinite depths. The man's early life had en- 
abled him to see, what was hidden from consciences 
more confused, the divine perfectness of Christ. The 
chief value of his good ways, of his steady heed to 
the commandments, was that it just brought him 
favorably to this very moment, and set him with 
open-eyed perception before Messiah's face. By the 
vision of so holy a spirit, as it passed near him, he 
had caught the feeling of a higher life than that of 
well-ordered habit; had been irresistibly drawn to 
put the question so fatal to his peace ; had heard his 
own consciousness repeated, and sent like a bell- 
stroke to his heart, in the deep words, ' Yet lackest 
thou one thing;' yet withal he had not strength to 
follow, and went away with the cloud settled on his 
spirit. And once having seen and refused a better 
life, he finds that the merely good life, adequate 
before, has lost all its sacredness. Henceforth it is 



310 



THE SORROW WITH DOWNWARD LOOK. 



without a charm, and empty of every inspiration ; 
and lies before him with dead and leaden aspect, 
tinged with no glory, and promising no heaven. And 
every mind of imperfect earnestness has to bear a 
like burden of sorrow, — not the Christ-like sorrow of 
infinite aspiration, chasing a good it cannot fully 
overtake, for that is a sorrow with upward look, 
piercing the heavens with a gaze of prayer, — but 
the shameful sorrow of penitent infirmity, retreating 
from the good it has refused to follow ; a sorrow 
with ever downcast look, to which the heavens are 
hid, and the earth bereft of beauty and soiled w T ith 
common dust. 

All men are liable to this grievous experience ; for 
all are visited by gleams of something fairer and 
more faithful than their own lives. But those are 
most fearfully exposed to it, who have the dangerous 
yet. glorious gift of high powers and opportunities. 
Had Christ never crossed the path of that youth of 
great possessions, his imagination w T ould have re- 
mained without its divinest picture, and his con- 
science without its deadliest reproach. Or had he 
been rich only, and not thoughtful too, he might 
have passed that consecrated figure by, and felt no 
shadow fall on his content. The privilege and the 
sadness came together. And those who are haunted 
by no visions of higher good, who see only what the 
sun or moon may shine upon ; on whom no lifted 
veil lets in the splendors so kindling to the nobler 
Reason, so fatal to the feeble Will, — escape the 
sighs of bitterest regret. Whoso is placed of God 
upon the loftiest heights, is on the verge of the most 
enshadowed chasms. The revelations of thought 
and conscience are awful privileges, vainly coveted 



THE SOKEOW WITH DOWNWARD LOOK. 311 

by profane ambition, and even to the devout and 
wise, safe only when received with pure self-renun- 
ciation. The richest lights that fall upon the soul 
lie next to the deepest tones of shade. Messiah's 
first gaze of divine affection on the half-earnest youth 
would doubtless send through his heart a hopeful 
joy; but afterwards, when he had lapsed into the old 
and common self, that very glance would become a 
terrible remembrance. And so is it with us all ; 
every light of moral beauty, permitted to entrance, 
but not allowed to guide us, becomes, like the after- 
image of the sun when idly stared at, a dark speck 
upon the soul, which follows us at all our work, 
adheres to every object, approaches and recedes in 
dreams, and is neither evaded by movement, nor 
washed out by tears. If the fairest gifts are not to 
be turned into haunting griefs, it can only be by 
following in the ways of duty and denial along 
which they manifestly lead ; and, while yet they 
look upon us, like the eye of Christ, with a sacred 
love, resolving on that quiet self-surrender, which 
shall meet their solemn claim, and prevent our ever 
hearing again the words, ' Yet lackest thou one 
thing.' 



XXV. 



THE SHADOW OF DEATH. 

Philippians i. 21. 
for to me to lite is christ, and to' die is gain. 

It is natural to conclude that one who could feel 
death to be a gain, must have had few treasures in 
life to lose. The sentiment evidently belongs to a 
heart that had either outlived the objects of affection 
and favorite pursuit ; or else had loved little, while 
capable of loving much, and was unattached to the 
scene of human existence except at its points of duty. 
It is perfectly conceivable that a mind disengaged from 
external realities, keeping together and entire its own 
feelings, interested most profoundly in the abstrac- 
tions of its own faith and hope, may welcome the 
transition to another form of being, in which it will 
retain its individuality complete, and be surrounded 
by new objects tempting it at length to open forth. 
He that has no deep root in this world, may suffer 
transplantation without pain. And thus it was with 
Paul. His ardent and generous soul had fastened 
itself on no one living object, but on an abstraction, 
a thing of his own mind, the truth. For half his life 
a wanderer over the earth, no place looked up at him 
with a domestic eye. Called as he was into ever 
new society, and passing rapidly through all orders 
of men ; accustomed to study in quick succession 



THE SHADOW OF DEATH. 



313 



the feelings of slave and philosopher, of Jew, of 
Asiatic, of Athenian and Roman, his personal sym- 
pathies were disciplined to promptitude rather than 
to profundity. He rested nowhere long enough to 
feel his nature silently yet irrevocably depositing itself 
there, but was at all times ready to gather up his 
feelings and pass on. Christ and God, the objects 
of his most earnest love, were viewless and ideal 
here, and would become realities only when death 
had transferred him to the future. It is true that a 
noble attachment bound him to his disciples ; but he 
loved them, less in their individual persons and for 
their own sakes, than as depositaries of the truth, — 
as links of a living chain of minds by which that 
truth would complete its circuit, and find a passage 
for its renovating power. Nor was there anything 
in his outward condition to which his desires could 
eagerly cling. The world, as a place of shelter, had 
been spoiled for him, by the Gospel ; his pure tastes 
were revolted, his sympathies stung, at every turn. 
At Jerusalem, the impending fate of friends and 
country brooded on his spirit like a cloud ; in Rome, 
the springs of social enjoyment were poisoned by the 
penetrating taint of a voluptuous polytheism ; at 
every table was the altar, on every tongue the light 
oath, of Idolatry. In every aspect society presented 
a scene, not for rest, but for toil ; not to be enjoyed, 
but to be reformed. It offered no place where the 
Christian might innocently retreat within the sanctity 
of a home ; but summoned him forth, in the spirit 
of an earnest and almost impatient benevolence, to 
purchase by his own good fight of persuasion and 
of faith, a fuller purity and peace for coming times. 
In this noble conflict, life afforded to Paul the satisfac- 
27 



314 



THE SHADOW OP DEATH. 



tions of moral victory ; but death offered the per- 
secuted apostle the only prospect of personal release ; 
from the prison it would transfer him to the skies ; 
and the fetters would fall from his hand in the free- 
dom of immortality. 

That Paul, thus insulated from earthly attachments, 
should feel a deeper interest in the future than in the 
present, is perfectly natural. But when Christians 
take up this feeling as essential to every disciple ; 
when they proclaim it a solemn duty to postpone 
every human feeling to the attractions of the eternal 
state : — when they say. 1 it is not enough to take the 
promises to your heart as true comfort in your sorrow, 
but even in glad scenes of life, in youth, amid the ties 
of nature, in the very jubilee of affections, you must 
yearn towards Heaven more than to the world, and 
to feel that to go, is far better than to stay ; ' — they 
are guilty of an insincere and mischievous parody on 
the sentiments of the Apostle. If we are to believe 
the rhapsodies of a prevalent fanaticism, no one has 
any vital religion who does not think the world a 
waste, and life a burden, and all human affections 
snares of sin ; whose impressions of God, and emo- 
tions towards Christ, do not far transcend in their 
intensity the love of kindred and of men ; and who 
do not, in all earnest moments of reflection, sigh for 
the hour which shall rescue them from their mortality. 
If a shade creeps upon the countenance at the con- 
sciousness that youth departs, and that the foot has 
already entered the declining path ; if we cannot 
think of the wreck of vigor without regret, or look 
into a grave without a s,igh ; if we manifest in any 
way that the mystery of mortality presses upon our 
hearts to sadden them ; — the only comfort that is of- 



THE SHADOW OF DEATH. 



315 



fered us is, that we can have no real Christianity 
within us ; and since we shrink from the thought of 
death so much, and yearn for Heaven so little, we 
must expect the retribution that never ends. Even 
those who hold a creed more merciful than this, re- 
gard such feelings with grave disapprobation, and 
suppose them to have their root in distrust of Provi- 
dence and doubts of Immortality. Yet the human 
heart quietly vindicates its own rights, and still weeps 
for death ; the last hour is still felt to be a trial, not 
a joy, — a fitting time for resignation and meek trust, 
not for transport ; and, to bear it well, is held suffi- 
cient proof of a good and faithful hope. In spite of 
the imagined eagerness to depart and be with Christ, 
even the elect preserve their mortal life with no less 
care than the unbeliever ; and religious suicides, in 
impatience for an assured salvation, are crimes un- 
heard of yet. Nor is the funeral converted yet from a 
scene of grief into an ovation. It is obvious then 
that in this assumption of the Apostolic sentiment 
there is a latent insincerity, — an unconscious self- 
delusion, — as indeed there always is, where states of 
feeling rarely attainable are insisted on as essen- 
tial duties. Unhappily this hollow and inflated reli- 
gion is far from being a harmless self-deception. 
Sarcastic sagacity sees its emptiness and scoffs. 
Minds affectionate and refined are revolted by a 
faith, calling for the excision of human affections 
which are an integrant portion of their life, and 
scowling on that lofty melancholy which has been 
often declared inseperable from superior natures. 
And thus the profession of religion, in its more ear- 
nest form, is apt to be found in association with the 
cold heart that, caring little for anything here, gains 



316 



THE SHADOW OF DEATH. 



an easy credit for sublimer aspirations ; that reviles a 
scene of existence to whose beauty it is insensible, 
and plumes itself on freedom from human attach- 
ments, which it is not noble enough to feel ; that has 
no better way of clothing the Heaven above with 
glory, than by making the earth below look hideous. 
In order to present some counteraction of conceptions 
so injurious, it may be useful to define the actual 
place which the immortal hope should occupy in 
our regards. 

The true and natural state of mind is found, I ap- 
prehend, when the future of our faith is less loved 
than happy and virtuous existence on earth, but more 
loved than life here upon unfaithful or forbidden 
terms; — when, leaving unimpaired our content with 
permitted happiness, it brings the needful solace to 
affliction. It matters not that the realities of that 
higher world will doubtless transcend our happiest 
life, and the successive stages of our being be ever 
progressive in excellence. The reality can affect us 
only through our ideas of it ; and these ideas present 
us with so faint an image of the truth, that its vivid- 
ness must be surpassed by the warmer and nearer 
light of our actual and happy experience. 

The future cannot reasonably be expected to com- 
pete with the present in our desires, because our con- 
ceptions of it are necessarily nothing more than a 
selection from the present. The scenery of our im- 
mortal hope is constructed from the scattered ele- 
ments of our mortal life. We borrow from memory 
its peaceful retrospect, from conscience its emotions 
of satisfied duty, from reason its delighted percep- 
tions of truth, from affection and faith, the repose of 
human sympathy, and the glow of diviner aspiration ; 



THE SHADOW OF DEATH. 



317 



and, combining all into one full thought glorified by 
the element of eternity, we see before us the future of 
our hopes. Whatever other resources the great real- 
ity may contain, whatever impenetrable mysteries lie 
within the ample folds of its duration, must be in- 
operative on us, because not present to our minds. 
We look therefore at earth* as comprising all the good 
which we have ever experienced; we look at heaven 
as repeating some. And though in words we may be 
assured of the superior intensity of the latter, in thought 
we can but dwell on it as it has been felt ; — he who 
has felt profoundly, anticipating vividly ; — he whose 
emotions are obtuse, looking on nothing but a blank. 
Nor does the conception of immense duration prac- 
tically impart much brilliancy to the impressions of 
faith; for, time is nothing to us, except as it is replete 
with events, compounded of successive points of con- 
sciousness ; and we have no adequate stock of con- 
ceptions of the futute wherewith to fill so mighty an 
expectancy, and people with various interest the 
vacuity of infinite ages. The actual effect of the 
Eternal hope is derived from the imagination of 
single passages of experience, — from the instanta- 
neous glance of some moment of blessedness or awe, 
— the smiting of a reproachful thought, the solution 
of a sad perplexity, — the vision of a recovered friend. 
It is not in ordinary human nature to prefer the frag- 
mentary happiness of heaven, as alone it can appear 
before our thoughts, to the complete and well known 
satisfactions of this life in its peaceful attitudes. 

Again, the future is to us an abstraction, a phan- 
tom, a floating vision, which cannot reasonably be 
expected to rival in interest the positive recollections 
of the actual scene in which we are placed. Sensible 
27* 



318 



THE SHADOW OF DEATH. 



impressions, ideas of visible and audible objects, would 
seem indispensable to the existence of distinct and 
vivid conception ; and when they depart, and we are 
called to think of events without any scenery ; of 
emotions without utterance ; of love without a hand 
to grasp ; of knowledge without the converse with 
men and books, without the real study of light and 
air and water, and the solid rocks, and the living 
things of the forest and the ocean ; of moral growth 
without a known theatre of moral action ; — the 
vision is apt to flit away in impalpable and spectral 
forms. It is not that we derive our chief enjoyment 
from the senses ; but material impressions are need- 
ful as the centres, the fixed points, round which feel- 
ings and recollections and imaginations cluster, and 
without which they are speedily dissipated. We love 
them, not on their own account, but as the shelter 
and the shrine of sentiments ineffably dear. The 
memories of childhood, — how do they rush upon the 
heart when we revisit the very scenes in which they 
had their birth ! One tone of a bell whose summons 
we were accustomed to obey, — the sight of a field 
where we met the companions of some favorite sport, 
— the re-entrance beneath a roof under which we 
gathered with brothers and sisters around the Christ- 
mas fire, — how do they do blessed violence to time, 
and snatch us into the past ! How do they make the 
atmosphere of our thoughts ring with the merry shout 
of playmates, or paint on the very space before us the 
smile of some dear absent face, or whisper the meek 
counsel of some departed voice ! So dependent are 
we on such outward things, that even slight changes 
in the parts of such a scene disturb us ; and the dis- 
appearance of a building or a tree seems to bereave 



THE SHADOW OF DEATH. 



319 



us of a thousand sympathies. Long habit endears 
even the most homely familiarities of our existence, 
and we cannot part with them without a pang; we 
hang our thoughts upon the surfaces of all things 
round us, — on the walls of our home, the hours of 
the day, the faces of neighbors, the quiet country, or 
the stir of the town. And then, too, the domesticities 
of life ! Oh God ! they would be too much for our 
religion were they not themselves in pure hearts a 
very form of that religion. If w T e could all go together, 
there would be nothing in it ; but that separate drop- 
ping off, — that departing one by one, — that drift 
from our anchorage alone, — that thrust into a wid- 
owed heaven, — who can deny it to be a lonesome 
thing ? It is mere ignorance of the human mind to 
expect the love of God to overpower all this. Why, 
the more we have thought of him, — the more we 
have venerated and trusted him, — so much the more 
closely has he too become associated with the famil- 
iar scenery and companions of our life ; they have 
grown into his image and interpreters ; they have 
established themselves as the shrine of our piety, the 
sanctuary of his spirit, the expression of his love ; and 
when we are torn from them, we seem to retire to a 
distance from his shelter. If Christ felt the cup to be 
bitter, and turned for a moment from the draught ; if 
he trembled that he shoud see no more the towers 
of Jerusalem, though to see them had drawn forth 
prophetic tears ; if he sorrowed in spirit to bid adieu 
to the family of Bethany, though the tie was that of 
friendship and not of home; if he hid his head at 
parting in the bosom of the beloved disciple, though 
to Mary the mother that disciple was needful still ; if 
he had rather that the immortal spirits of the elder 



320 



THE SHADOW OF DEATH. 



time should come to commune with him in the famil- 
iar groves of Tabor, than himself be borne to them 
he knew not whither ; if the Mount of Olives, his 
favorite retreat of midnight prayer, and the shore of 
the Galilean Lake, witness to the musings and enter- 
prises of his opening ministry, and the verdant slopes 
of Nazareth, sacred with the memories of early years, 
seemed to gaze in upon his melted soul with a 
beseeching look that he would not go ; — may not 
we, without the reproach of impiety or the suspicion 
of unacknowledged doubts, feel that to depart is no 
light struggle, and cast a lingering glance at the 
friendly scene we quit ? It is not the animal conflict 
of death, the corporeal pain of an organization ceas- 
ing to be, — to be much concerned about that were 
an unmanly fear. It is not any torturing apprehen- 
sion about the mysterious future, any dread of the 
great secret, any questioning whether all will be well 
there ; for a good man to be disturbed with such feel- 
ings, shows a morbid timidity of faith, a feeble dis- 
trust of the benignity of Providence, with which an 
affectionate piety will have no sympathy. It is sim- 
ply and solely the adieu to things loved and left, the 
exchange of the familiar for the new, from which 
our hearts may be justified if they recoil. Doubtless, 
the time will come, when successive strokes of 
bereavement have fallen upon our homes, for that 
recoil to cease. When in the sanctuary of the af- 
fections the lights are almost extinguished, and those 
that remain only enable us to read the inscriptions on 
the multitude of surrounding tombs ; when, in fact, 
the solitude would be, not to depart but to remain — 
we may well and naturally feel that it is time to go, 
and our prayer may be speedily withdrawn to the 



THE SHADOW OF DEATH. 



821 



place of rest. For now, whatever may be the indis- 
tinctness of the future, the groups of friendship are 
there ; they make the best part of its scenery ; and 
wherever they are is a shelter and a home. How- 
ever strange to us the colony may be in which they 
dwell, if, as we cross the deeps of death, their vision- 
ary forms shall crowd the shore, and people the hills 
of that unvisited abode, it will be to us 'a better 
country, even a heavenly.' 

There is then a glow in this world more genial and 
less faint than the orb of everlasting hope ; and yet a 
darkness too, most thankful for its mild and holy 
beams. Pale at our mid-day, it attains its glory at 
our noon of night; and if it does not light us at our 
work, lifts us when we watch and pray. The proper 
entrance for faith and hope lies between the ripeness 
of blessing and the deepening of sadness ; between 
the crown and the cross of life. Do you think that 
so modest a place, for so great an expectation, is inju- 
rious to the dignity of religion ? Perhaps it is in the 
better harmony with its humility ; at least it seems 
not unsuitable to a mind which is so grateful for the 
present, as to shrink from pressing anxious claims 
upon the future ; which loves so well the given world 
of God, as not often to remind him of the promised 
one. "Were this the only eclipse which the immortal 
prospect is liable to suffer, there would be little need 
to lament the languor of its light. That causes less 
excusable also intercept its influence, is not indeed to 
be denied ; but where are we to seek the remedy ? 
Shall we endeavor to loosen the affections from this 
life, and forbid all heart-alleigance towards a scene to 
which we are tempted so strongly to cling ? Alas! 
we shall not love Heaven more for loving earth less ; 



322 



THE SHADOW OF DEATH. 



this would be a mere destruction of one set of sym- 
pathies, in no way tending to the creation of another. 
The love of God may even find its root in the love 
of kindred ; and admiration of his works and ways is 
the germ of adoration of himself. If it is from the 
blessings of the present that we construct our concep- 
tion of the future, to enfeeble our sense of these 
blessings is to take away the very materials of faith. 
No ; the needful thing is not that we abate, but that 
we consecrate the interests and affections of our life ; 
entertain them with a thoughtful heart ; serve them 
with the will of duty ; and revere them as the ben- 
ediction of our God. The same spirit which takes 
the veil of Deity from the present will drive away the 
clouds that overhang the future ; and he that makes 
his moments devout, shall not feel his eternity to be 
cheerless. And as it is the fascinations of affection- 
ate memory that hold us back, they may be not a 
little counteracted by the creations of sacred hope. 
We shall be less servilely detained among things 
seen, when we are less indolent in our conceptions of 
things unseen ; we freely cast into them every bles- 
sed remembrance, every high pursuit, every unan- 
swered aspiration, every image pure and dear ; and 
invest them with the forms of a divine and holy 
beauty. If the particular good which we imagine 
should not arrive, it can only be because God will 
present us with far better. Without this free license 
for the creations of faith, I see not how, while we 
are mortals yet, Immortality can exercise its due at- 
traction upon our minds. To die, can never, with- 
out an enthusiasm which does violence to reason, 
and little credit to the heart, be an act of transport ; 
so low as an act of submission it need not sink ; for 



THE SHADOW OF DEATH. 



323 



that would imply a belief that the change from the 
present to the future is for evil. It is most fitly met 
in the spirit of trust ; — an unbroken belief that it is 
for the better, but a feeling of reluctance, which we 
distrust and check, as though it were for the worse ; 
a consciousness that, if we choose for ourselves, we 
should remain where we are, yet not a doubt of the 
greater wisdom and goodness of God's choice, that 
we should go. If this spirit of humble faith be not 
high-wrought enough, may God forgive the loving 
hearts that can attain no better ! 



XXVI 



GREAT HOPES FOR GREAT SOULS. 
1 Corinthians xv. 48. 

AS IS THE HEAVENLY, SUCH ARE THEY ALSO THAT ARE HEAVENLY. 

The contempt with which it is the frequent prac- 
tise of divines to treat the grounds of natural reli- 
gion, betrays an ignorance both of the true office of 
revelation, and of the true wants of the human heart. 
It cannot be justified except on the supposition that 
there is some contradiction between the teachings of 
creation and those of Christ, with some decided pre- 
ponderance of proof in favor of the latter. Even if 
the Gospel furnished a series of perfectly new truths, 
of which nature had been profoundly silent, it would 
be neither reasonable nor safe to fix exclusive atten- 
tion on these recent and historical acquisitions, and 
prohibit all reference to those elder oracles of God, 
by which his Spirit, enshrined in the glories of his 
universe, taught the fathers of our race. And if it be 
the function of Christianity not to administer truth 
entirely new, but to corroborate by fresh evidence, 
and invest with new beauty, and publish to the 
millions with a voice of power, a faith latent already 
in the hearts of many, and scattered through the 
speculations of the wise and noble few, — to erect 
into realities the dreams which had visited a half- 
inspired philosophy, interpreting the life and lot of 



GREAT HOPES FOE GREAT SOULS. 325 

man ; — then there is a relation between the religion 
of nature and that of Christ, — a relation of original 
and supplement, — which renders the one essential to 
the apprehension of the other. Revelation, you say, 
has given us the clue by which to thread the laby- 
rinth of creation, and extricate ourselves from its pas- 
sages of mystery and gloom. Be it so ; still, there, 
in the scene thus cleared of its perplexity, must our 
worship be paid, and the manifestations of Deity 
be sought. If the use of revelation be to explain the 
perplexities of Providence and life, it would be a 
strange use to make of the explanation were we to 
turn away from the thing explained. "We hold the 
key of heaven in our hands. What folly to be forever 
extolling and venerating it, whilst we prohibit all ap- 
proach to the temple, whose gates it is destined to 
unlock. 

The great doctrine of human immortality has re- 
ceived from Christianity its widest and noblest effi- 
cacy ; has been lifted for many a generation from a 
low point of probability to the confines of certainty ; 
and has found in the risen and ascended Jesus an 
answer to the difficulties which most embarrass the 
faith and hope of the human mind. But the influ- 
ence which is most effectual in diffusing a truth in 
the first instance, is not always the best for creating 
the better and later faith of the reflecting heart ; and 
when the historical illustration is exhausted of some- 
thing of its power, it may be useful to the feelings 
and imagination to dwell on considerations, of fee- 
bler force, perhaps, but of nearer and deeper interest. 
Thus it is with the natural indications of human im- 
mortality. Nature and life, our sins and sorrows, 
our virtues and our peace, have on them the traces 
28 



326 



GREAT HOPES FOR GREAT SOULS. 



of a great futurity ; and to neglect these is to pay a 
dubious and even fatal honor to revelation. The 
Christian history is a matter long past ; the resur- 
recton of our great Prophet is viewed by us at the re- 
moter end of a series of centuries ; and the vibration 
with which it should thrill our affections is almost 
lost in traversing so vast a gulf. But if in the actual 
phenomena of human life and its distribution of good 
and ill, — if in the very constitution of our own 
minds, there are evidences of a cycle of existence be- 
yond the present, we have here a voice, not of history, 
but of experience, bidding us to look up ; a warning 
from the living present, not from the tomb of the 
past; and though it may be less clear in its an- 
nouncements, yet may the gentlest whisper at our 
right hand startle us more than the loudest echo from 
afar. It is a solemn thing, when we gaze intently 
at the dial of our fate, and listen to the beats that 
number our vicissitudes, to see its index distinctly 
pointing to eternity. The exclusive appeal to the 
historical evidence of futurity is one great cause, I 
believe, of the feeble effect of this mighty expectation. 
Till it has felt that Heaven is needed to complete the 
history of earth, till men become conscious of capac- 
ities for which their present sphere of action is too 
contracted, till the wants of the intellect and the affec- 
tions cry aloud within them for the boundless and the 
eternal, the distant words of Christian promise will 
die away, ere they reach their hearts ; there will be 
no visible infinitude of hope ; and amid the incessant 
verbal recognition of the great hereafter, practical 
doubts will brood over the feelings, which will blight 
all true sincerity of faith. The character of some of 
these doubts I proceed to indicate, — doubts not of 



GREAT HOPES FOE, GREAT SOULS. 



327 



direct speculation, not arising from any perception of 
fallacy in the evidence, not therefore leading to any 
denial of the doctrine of futurity, — but doubts that 
lurk obscurely in the feelings, cold, silent, undefined; 
that come and go like spectres, — come when we ab- 
hor, and vanish when we seek them ; that shun the 
steady gaze of the intellect, and haunt with fiend-like 
stare the uplifted eye of broken hope and trembling 
love. It will appear that these doubts are peculiar to 
our inferior states of character ; that when the higher 
parts of our nature are developed, and the adaptation 
of immortality to our true wants is felt, they dis- 
appear. 

There are doubts obtruded on us by our animal 
nature. It is not at all surprising that in proportion 
as we attend to the perishable part of our nature, our 
nature should appear perishable ; and that in propor- 
tion as we neglect the mind, which alone has any 
heritage in the future, the future should become 
obscure. True though it is that we are fearfully 
and wonderfully made, there is something humili- 
tating in the protracted and exclusive study of man's 
physical organizaton ; and whatever indications it 
affords of the designing benevolence of God, it rather 
troubles than assists the conception of the immortal- 
ity of man ; for that benevolence, being equally man- 
ifested in the structures of the brute creation, cannot 
direct us to the hopes of higher natures. When the 
thoughts have been intently fixed on the physiology 
of the human body, when the frame has been an- 
alyzed into its several organs, and the functions of 
our corporeal life described ; or when, in studying the 
natural history of man, we are led to compare him 
with the other tribes that people the earth, the imagi- 



328 



GREAT HOPES EOE. GKEAT SOULS. 



nation rises from such studies with secret uneasiness ; 
it has been, for the sake of knowledge, to the meaner 
haunts of our being, just as the philanthropist, for the 
sake of benevolence, frequents the dingy recesses of 
sin and misery ; it finds itself surrounded with cling- 
ing impressions of materialism, from which it must 
shake itself free, before it can release the holier rela- 
tions and loftier prospets of human existence. Nor is 
it unusual for death to be presented to us in an as- 
pect which unreasonably, but irresistibly, troubles the 
heart's diviner trust. Sometimes indeed in the last 
hour of a human life comes on so gentle a wing, that 
it seems a fit passage of a soul to God ; the feeble 
pulse which flutters into death, the fading eye whose 
light seems not to be blotted out but only to retire 
within, the fleeting breath that seems to stop, that 
the spirit may depart in reverent silence, — are like 
the signs of a contented exchange of worlds, of a 
mind that has nothing for which to struggle, because 
it passes to the peace of God. But when the strife 
is strong, — when at the solemn point of existence 
which seems most to demand an intent serenity of 
the soul, the animal nature starts to its supremacy 
and fiercely claims the mastery, and clings with con- 
vulsive grasp to the margin of mortality, our imagina- 
tions are visited with a deeper trouble than would 
arise merely from sympathy with the departing suf- 
ferer. ' Is this,' we think ' the transition to the skies, 
— this more like the end of hope than the beginning 
of peace, more like a thrust into the blackest night, 
than an ushering into the beautiful dawn of the eter- 
nal land ? ' And why is this ? It is the tyranny of 
our animal sympathies ; which may well be sceptical 
of immortality; for it is not for them. The corporeal- 



GREAT HOPES FOB GREAT SOULS. 329 

ity of our nature is for the time so vehemently foreed 
upon the attention, that we forget what else there is ; 
the half of the being is taken to represent the whole ; 
and that half is really coming to a close. When we 
retire from the dread impression of this scene, and 
remember the bright mind eclipsed only during the 
last hour; when we recognize in its history many a 
noble toil for truth, many a holy effort of duty, many 
an exhibition of moral and mental capability too 
great and gentle to find their gratification here, we 
gradaully return from the shock of nature to the 
quietude of faith. But this return depends on regard- 
ing the body as the instrument of the mind; and 
there are people who never do this, — men who take 
their limbs to be their life, and confound their senses 
with their soul, — who say wise things about the 
blessings of health and ease, and hear only empty 
words when there is mention of a full mind, and pure 
and resolute sentiments of conscience, and earnest 
affections human and divine. To such, — the sen- 
sual, — there is nothing else in man but body ; take 
that from their conceptions, and nothing remains. 
What then but an absolute blank before their mind 
can be an existence in which the material interests of 
our present being utterly vanish, and a spirituality un- 
known to them even in idea assumes the place? To 
say that they must look forward to it with the same 
kind of feeling as the musician to becoming deaf, and 
the artist to becoming blind, fails to convey an ade- 
quate idea of the emptiness, the absolute nothingness, 
of their anticipation. If we could conceive a being 
created with no inlet of consciousness but the sense of 
sight, — without thought, without emotion, without 
other sensation, — a being in fact all eye, we perceive 
23* 



330 



GREAT HOPES FOR GREAT SOULS. 



that it would be the same thing to him, whether his 
vision be paralyzed, or he himself be planted in the 
midst of deep and rayless night. To such a one, 
both conditions would be a total annihilation ; as life 
was nothing more than visual perception, so the pri- 
vation of such perception would be death ; the pres- 
ervation of the organ would be attended by no 
consciousness : in eternal darkness, its function, its 
pleasures and its pains, are for ever gone ; and had 
it never been, its non-existence could not be more 
perfect. Precisely similar is the view of futurity, — 
the futurity of the intellectual and social and moral 
powers of our nature, — to the sensual in whom 
these powers sleep. All the functions of existence 
with which he is familiar vanish from him ; and as 
well might he himself be blotted out, as be placed 
where all the offices and elements of his life disap- 
pear. He is an eye dipped in darkness, — an ear left 
alone in an infinitude of silence ; immortality is to 
him but prolonged paralysis ; it has nothing to distin- 
guish it from death. What wonder then that, in 
proportion as we resemble such a being, our feelings 
are harassed by a thousand doubts of renovated life. 
The doubts are indeed perfectly well founded ; for this 
nature there is no further life ; its mechanism wears 
out, and death casts it aside forever ; and, till that 
higher nature, of which it is the organic instrument, 
is born to full life within us, we have no kindred or 
affinity with the eternal state. But when, by nobler 
\ culture, by purer experience, by breathing the air of a 
I higher duty, vitality at length creeps into the soul, the 
1 instincts of immortality will wake within us. The 
Word of hope will speak to us a language no longer 
strange. We shall feel like the captive bird carried 



GREAT HOPES FOE, GREAT SOULS. 



331 



accidentally to its own land, when hearing for the 
first time the burst of kindred song from its native 
woods, it beats instinctively the bars of its cage in 
yearning for the free air that is thrilled with so sweet 
a strain. 

There are doubts forced on us by our selfish na- 
ture. A hard and self-inclosed mind is destitute of 
the feelings that look most intently on the future, and 
make it most credible, because most urgently need- 
ed by us. It is rather our sympathetic than our per- 
sonal happiness that is wounded by the conditions 
of our mortal being. For ourselves alone, if we love 
not deeply our own kind, it is usually possible to 
preserve a decent and sober life, a small order of 
happiness, respectably ensured from ruin, which will 
never feel impelled to look up and cry aloud to God. 
It is when we suffer ourselves to seek a profounder 
but a frailer bliss ; when the heart possesses a terrible 
stake in existence; when we yield ourselves to the 
strongest love, and yet can love nothing that we may 
not lose ; that we feel capacities which are mocked 
by the brevity of life, and totally incapable of exhaus- 
tion here. It is our affections chiefly that are dispro- 
portioned to our condition; they are an over-match 
for us in this world. God would never launch so frail 
a vessel on so stormy a sea, where the roll of every 
wave may wreck us, were it not designed to float at 
length on serener waters, and beneath gentler skies. 
Oh God ! it is terrible to think what may be lost in 
one human life ; what hope, what joy, what goodness, 
may drop with one creature into the grave ! how all 
things, now so full of the energies of a cheerful being, 
so copious in motive and in peace, so kindled by the 
smile of Providence, and ringing with the happy voi- 



332 



GEEAT HOPES FOE. GREAT SOUES. 



ces of nature and our kind, may droop and gloom be- 
fore us by one little change ! It is not from without 
but from within, — from the sacred but changing orb 
of our own love, — that the light and colors come, in 
which we see the scenery of existence clad ; and if 
there be an eclipse within, creation mourns beneath a 
film of darkness. It is, however, in such moments of 
sorrow, and in the perpetual consiousness that they 
may come, that we find the strongest call of thought 
to a more peaceful and stable 'being ; and that we 
are urged to fly to the distant regions in which the 
intercepted light still shines. Bat all this the heart 
of the selfish can never know; his sympathies are 
well-proportioned to the dimensions and the secu- 
rities of this state ; for all that he yet feels, an eternal 
life would be an enormous over-provision ; he has no 
passionate tenacity of love that clings imploringly to 
any blessing ; but is able to shrink into his shell of 
personal ease, and sleep. Nor does the wider benev- 
olence, the spirit of Christian philanthrophy to which 
the selfish man is equally insensible, stimulate less 
urgently the demand for immortality. How is it pos- 
sible to study deeply the lot of the great majority of 
men; — to see them ground down by toil; spending 
their years in bare self-continuation, and ending life 
without tasting of its fruits ; filled to satiety with 
labor, and starved to death within the mind, — how 
is it possible to see so much noble capability wasted, 
so much true blessedness lost, so many, first created 
a little lower than the angels, and then forced nearly 
to a level with the brutes, — without providing in our 
thoughts a future vindication of the Creator, — a life 
in which the fearful inequality will be compensated, 
and the suspended good at length born ? But the cold 



GREAT HOPES FOR GREAT SOTJLS. 



333 



and self-regarding mind cannot understand a senti- 
ment like this. It has no such sympathy with the 
well-being of others as to feel that their habitual pri- 
vations constitute a moral claim upon the benev- 
olence of God. It has no generous faith in the 
possibilities of human improvement ; but thinking 
meanly of its kind, is not disconcerted by the mean- 
ness of its destiny. Ignorant of the immeasurable 
contents of our nature, of the resources of our human 
affections, of the heroic energies of duty, and the sub- 
lime peace of God, he sees nothing worth immortal- 
izing ; and because he himself would be an anomaly 
in heaven, he fancies heaven too good for man. Thus 
selfishness, like sensuality, secretly conscious . of its 
ignobility, and interpreting by its own experience 
the whole race of human kind, stifles within us the 
Eternal Hope. 

Causes not moral, like the foregoing, but merely 
intellectual, tend also to disturb the feelings with 
doubts on this subject. Very contracted knowledge 
and feeble imagination will usually possess but a 
fluctuating faith in all truths remote from experience. 
Though our faith may go far beyond our experience, 
it must always be chained down by it at a distance ; 
our conceptions of probability are limited by the an- 
alogies within our reach ; the magnitude of each one's 
possible must bear some proportion to his actual ; the 
invisible scenes which he imagines will be graduated 
by the visible which he beholds. In proportion, there- 
fore, as our ideas are few, and the circle of our intel- 
lectual perceptions more narrowly bounded, will it 
be difficult for us to feel the possibility of a state so 
totally new, so little familiarized to us by any known 
resemblances to our present condition, as the futurity 



334 



GREAT HOPES FOE GBEAT SOULS. 



to which we tend. This incompetency of religious 
imagination is far from being exclusively attendant 
on what the world calls ignorance. It may be found 
often beneath the polished speech, the practised ad- 
dress, the agile faculties of men conspicuous in affairs ; 
being as much the creation of voluntary habit, as the 
consequence of helpless incapacity. Aptitude for 
business is not powder of Reason ; and a grandee on 
exchange may be a pauper in God's universe. To 
calculate shrewdly is different from meditating wisely ; 
and, where turned into an exclusive engagement, is 
even more hostile to it than the torpor of the entire 
mind. The pointed, distinct, and microscopic atten- 
tion which we direct upon the details of human ex- 
istence here, is unfavorable to the comprehensive 
vision of a boundless sphere ; the glass through 
which we best look at the minutiae near us, serves 
but to confuse our gaze upon the stars. Growing 
knowledge, enlarging thought, the reverent estimate of 
truth and beauty, furnish us with a thousand facili- 
ties for illustrating and realizing the unseen, and 
replenishing its blank abyss with bright creations. 
Nay, the mental horizon spreads by mere extention of 
the physical ; and as our station rises above the 
world, our range of possibilities and our willingness 
of faith appear to grow. For who can deny the ef- 
fect of wide Space alone in aiding the conception of 
vast Time ? The spectator who in the dingy cellar 
of the city, under the oppression of a narrow dwelling, 
watching the last moments of some poor mendicant, 
finds incongruity and perplexity in the thought of 
the eternal state, would feel the difficulty vanish in 
an instant, were he transplanted to the mountain-top, 
where the plains and streams are beneath him, and 



GREAT HOPES FOR GREAT SOULS. 



335 



the clouds are near him, and the untainted breeze of 
Heaven sweeps by, and he stands alone with Nature 
and with God. And when in addition to the mere 
spectacle and love of nature, there is a knowledge of 
it too ; when the laws and processes are understood 
which surround us with wonder and beauty every 
day ; when the great cycles are known through which 
the material creation passes without decay ; then, 
in the immensity of human hopes, there appears 
nothing which need stagger faith ; it seems no longer 
strange, that the mind which interprets the material 
creation should survive its longest period, and be ad- 
mitted to its remoter realms. 

Thus, in proportion as our nature rises in its noble- 
ness, does it realize its immortality. As it retires from 
animal grossness, from selfish meanness, from pitiable 
ignorance or sordid neglect, — as it opens forth into 
its true intellectual and moral glory, — do its doubts 
disperse, its affections aspire : the veil is uplifted from 
the future, the darkness breaks away, and the spirit 
walks in dignity within the paradise of God's Eter- 
nity. What a testimony this to the great truth from 
which our hope and consolations flow ! What an in- 
citement to seek its bright and steady light by the 
culture of every holy faculty within us! The more 
we do the will of our Father, the more do we feel 
that this doctrine is indeed of him. Its affinities are 
with the loftiest part of our nature ; and in our trust 
in it, we ally ourselves with the choicest spirits of 
our race. And while we sympathize with them in 
their past faith, we prepare to meet them where we 
may assume their nearer likeness. Ever seek we 
therefore the things which are above. 



XXVII. 



LO! GOD IS HERE! 
Acts xyii. 30. 

and the times op this ignorance god winked at ; but now 
commandeth all men eyert where to repent. 

Paul, it would appear, looked with a very different 
feeling on times past, and times present. Behind 
him, he saw the age of ignorance and irreligion, so 
dark and wild, that life appeared to lie quite outside 
the realm of Providence, and earth to be covered by- 
no heaven. Around him he beheld the very aera of 
God, in which the third heavens seemed almost with- 
in reach, and life was so filled with voices of duty 
and hope, that it appeared like some vast whispering 
gallery, to render what else had been a divine silence 
and mystery, audible and articulate. Behind he saw 
a world abandoned ; from which the great Ruler 
seemed to have retired, or at least averted the light 
of his countenance ; to which he spake no word, and 
gave no intelligible sign ; about whose doings it were 
painful to say much ; for so little were they in the 
likeness of his government, so abhorrent from the 
spirit of his sway, that they must have been enacted 
during the slumber of his power. But now, the hour 
of awakening had arrived ; the foul dream of the 
world's profaneness must be broken ; and Heaven 



LO ! GOD IS HERE ! 



337 



would forbear no more. The divine light was abroad 
again ; divine tones were floating through this lower 
atmosphere, and came, like solemn music, across the 
carnival shouts of sensualism and sin. Out of hear- 
ing of these tones, the far-travelled Apostle never 
passed ; they reached him through the rush of waters, 
as he sailed by night over the iEgean ; the voluble 
voices of Athens could not drown them ; they vibrated 
through the traffic and the cries of Roman streets, 
and even pierced the brutal acclamations of the 
amphitheatre ; they were ubiquitious as God, who 
was everywhere commanding all men to repent. 
"Whether in his own life, or in the world, Paul found 
the Pasty to he profane, the Present, divine. 

With us this order is reversed. Our faith delights 
to expound, not what God is doing now, but what he 
did once ; to prove that formerly he was much con- 
cerned with the affairs of this earth and the spirits of 
men, though he has abstained from personal inter- 
vention for many ages and become a spectator of the 
scene. The point of time at which our thoughts 
search for his agency, and feel after him to find him, 
lies not at hand, but far ; belongs not to to-day, but 
to distant centuries ; and must be reached by an his- 
torical memory, not by individual consciousness. To 
our feelings, the period of Divine absenteeism is the 
present ; wherein we live on the impression half worn 
out, of his ancient visitations; obey as we can the 
precepts he is understood to have given of the old ; 
and, like children opening again and again the last 
tattered letter from a parent mysteriously silent in a 
foreign land, cheer ourselves with such assurance of 
his love as he may have put on record in languages 
anterior to our own. 6 O happy age,' — ■ we think, — 



338 



LO ! GOD IS HERE ! 



'that really heard his voice! O glorious souls, that 
felt his living inspiration ! O blessed lot, though it 
passed through the desert and the fire, that lay be- 
neath the shelter of his peace!' In short, our expe- 
rience is the opposite of Paul's. That voice which 
commanded all men to repent, resounds no more ; its 
date has gone clear away into antiquity ; and it can 
faintly reach us only through the dead report of a 
hundred witnesses. Once it was the very spirit of 
God quivering over the soul of man, — a mountain- 
air stirring on the face of the waters. The frosts of 
time may have fixed the surface, and caught the form ; 
but how different this from the trembling movement 
of our humanity beneath the sweep of that living 
breath ! No such holy murmur reaches us, to whom 
the Present is earthly, and the Past divine. 

Perhaps some one may deny that there is any real 
variance between Paul's estimate and ours ; on the 
ground that, in his view, the time sacred above all 
others was his own ; and in our retrospect that time 
remains so still. Yet it may be conjectured, that if 
we could be put back into his age, we should hardly 
see it with his eyes. Possibly enough, we might look 
about to no purpose for that presence of the Holiest 
which followed him through life ; and listen with dis- 
appointed ear, for that whisper that ' everywhere I 
came to him from the Infinite; and though at his 
side when he was in the third heaven, might see 
nothing but the walls of his apartment, in coldest 
exile from the transport of the skies. If you go into 
the tent-maker's warehouse, where he worked at 
Corinth, you find the canvass and the tools, and 
even the men that ply them, such as you may pass 
without notice every day. The lane in which he 



LO I GOD IS HERE ! 



339 



lived in Rome seems too dingy for anything divine, 
and the noisy neighbors too ordinary to kindle any 
elevated zeal. The city's heat and din, the common 
crush of life, the hurry from task to task, seem far 
enough from the cool atmosphere of prayer, and the 
glad silence of immortal hopes. And if you converse 
with the men and women, for whom the Apostle 
gave his toils and tears, who received the whole af- 
fluence of his sympathies, you may be amazed per- 
chance, that he could find them so interesting ; and 
lament to discover in such an age of golden days, the 
vulgar speech, the narrow mind, the selfish will, the 
envious passions, of these later times. And taking 
the converse supposition, — think you, if he had been 
transplanted from Mars Hill to Westminster, he 
would have been beyond the hearing of that voice of 
God which he proclaimed and obeyed ? — that the 
celestial light which rested upon life would have 
passed away ? — that his hope would have been as 
faint, his worship as unreal, his whole being as 
mechanical, as ours ? Ah, no ! let there be a soul of 
power like his within ; and it matters not what 
weight of world may be cast on it from without. Be 
we in this century or that, — nay in heaven or on 
earth, — it is not that we find, but that we must 
make, the Present holy and divine. 

In vain then do we plead, that our view of time 
coincides with that of Paul. With such temper as 
we have, we should have listened to him on Areo- 
pagus in the spirit of the Epicureans that heard him; 
not refusing perhaps to join the light laugh at his 
enthusiasm ; and wondering bow a man with his foot 
on the solid ground of life and nature, can cast himself 
madly into the abyss of a fancied futurity, and an 



340 



LO ! GOD IS HERE ! 



absent God. And as, in yielding to the suggestions 
of such temper, we should have felt falsely, and have 
looked on Paul's age with a deluded eye, so would 
his be the true vision of our times ; and his earnest 
proclamation of the continued sanctity of existence 
would show his discerning intuition of realities con- 
cealed from us. For God has not faded into a re- 
membrance ; he has not retired from this scene with 
the generations known only to tradition. His ener- 
gies have no era ; his sentiments cannot be obsolete ; 
' his compassions fail not.' Why, even sense and 
material nature, his poorest and faintest interpreters, 
rebuke this foolish dream, — that he was, rather than 
is. They forbid us to think of him thus, were it only 
in the mere character of the Creator. They show us 
in the very structure of our globe, — in the rocks be- 
neath our feet, — in the vast cemeteries and monu- 
ments they disclose of departed races of creatures, — 
that creation is not single, but successive ; not 
an act, but a process ; not the work of a week or 
of a century, but of immeasurable ages : not more- 
over past but continuous and everlasting ; as busy, as 
mysterious, as vast now, as in the darkest antiquity ; 
so that Genesis tells the story of last week, as truly 
as of the six days that ushered in the world's first 
Sabbath. The universe indeed is not so much a 
definite machine which once he made, and beyond 
which he dwells to see it move, as his own infinite 
abode and ever-changing manifestation ; — living, be- 
cause the dwelling of his power, — boundless, be- 
cause the chamber of his presence ; ever fresh, 
because the receptacle of his designs ; fair, because 
the expression of his love. Now, as of old, he that 
will listen with the open ear of meditation, may 



LO ! GOD IS HERE I 



341 



surely hear the Lord God walking in his garden of 
Creation in the cool of every day. 

The same temper which leads us to search for 
Deity only in distant times, causes us to banish him 
also into distant space ; and persuades us that he is 
not here, but there. He is thought to dwell above, 
beneath, around the earth ; but who ever thinks of 
meeting him on its very dust? Awfully he shrouds 
the abyss; and beningly he gazes on us from the 
stars ; but in the field and the street, no trace of him 
is felt to be. Under the ocean, and in the desert, and 
on the mountain-top, he is believed to rest; but into 
the nearer haunts of town and village, we rarely con- 
ceive him to penetrate. Yet where better could 
wisdom desire his presence, than in the common 
homes of men, — in the thick cares and heavy toils, 
and grievous sorrows, of humanity ? For surely, if 
Nature needs him much in her solitudes, life requires 
him more in the places of passion and of sin. And 
in truth, if we cannot feel him near us in this world, 
we could approach him, it is greatly to be feared, in 
no other. Could a wish remove us bodily to any 
distant sphere supposed to be divine, the heavenly 
presence would flit away as we arrived ; would occu- 
py rather the very earth we had been eager to quit ; 
and would leave us still amid the same material 
elements, that seem to hide the Infinite vision from 
our eyes. Go where we may, we seem mysteriously 
to carry our own circumference of darkness with us; 
for who can quit his own centre, or escape the point 
of view, — or of blindness, — which belongs to his 
own identity ? He who is not with God already, 
can by no path of space find the least approach ; in 
vain would you lend him the wing of angel or the 
29* 



342 



LO ! GOD IS HERE ! 



speed of light; in vain plant him here or there, — on 
this side of death or that ; he is in the outer darkness 
still ; having that inner blindness which would leave 
him in pitchy night, though like the angel of the 
Apocalypse, he were standing in the sun. But ceas- 
ing all vain travels, and remaining with his foot upon 
this weary earth, let him subside into the debths of 
his own wonder and love ; let the touch of sorrow, or 
the tears of conscience, or the toils of duty, open the 
hidden places of his affections; — and the distance, 
infinite before, wholly disappears ; and he finds, like 
the Patriarch, that though the stone is his pillow, and 
the earth his bed, he is yet in the very house of God, 
and at the gate of heaven. Oh! my friends, if there 
be nothing celestial without us, it is only because all 
is earthly within ; if no divine colors upon our lot, 
it is because the holy light is faded on the soul ; if 
our Father seems distant, it is because we have taken 
our portion of goods, and travelled into a far country, 
to set up for ourselves, that we may foolishly enjoy, 
rather than reverently serve. Whenever he is im- 
magined to be remote and almost slumbering, be 
assured it is human faith that is really heavy and on 
the verge of sleep ; drowsy with too much ease, or 
tired with too much sense ; that it has lapsed from 
the severe and manly strivings of duty and affection, 
and given itself over to indulgence, and become the 
lazy hireling of prudence. An Epicurean world inevit- 
ably makes an Epicurean God ; and when we cease 
to do anything from spontaneous loyalty to the great 
Ruler, we necessarily doubt whether he can have 
occasion to do anything for us. Such doubts are 
vainly attacked by speculative proof, and evidence 
skilfully arranged; the clearest and the cloudiest 



LO ! GOD IS HEEE ! 



343 



intellect are liable to them alike ; for they arise from 
the practical feebleness of the inner man; from a 
dwindled force in the earnest, self-forgetful affections ; 
and can be dissipated only by trustful abandonment 
once more to some object of duty and devotion. 
The times and people that have vividly felt the prox- 
imity of God, have always been characterized by 
hearty and productive affections ; by vast enterprises 
and great sacrifices ; by the seeds of mighty thought 
dropped upon the world, and the fruits of great 
achievements contributed to human history. In con- 
tact with every grand era in the experience of man- 
kind, will be found the birth of religion; — a fresh 
discovery of the preternatural and mysterious; a 
plenary sense of God ; the descent of a Holy Spirit 
on waiting hearts ; a day of Pentecost to strong and 
faithful souls, giving them the utterance of a divine 
persuasion, and dispersing a new Gospel over the 
world. We, alas! are far enough, — far at least as 
the days of Wesley, — from any such period of in- 
spiration in the past ; perhaps, however, the nearer to 
it in the future, as there is no night unfollowed by 
the dawn. It is not permitted us too curiously to 
search the hidden providences of our humanity; but 
one thing we cannot fail to notice ; that a return to 
simple, undisguised affections, — to natural and vera- 
cious speech, — to earnest and inartificial life, — has 
characterized every great and noble period, and all 
morally powerful and venerable men. To such tastes 
and affections, and to the secret rule of conscience 
which presides among them, we must learn to trust, 
whatever be the seductions of opinion, and the sophis- 
tries of expediency, and even the pleadings of the 
speculative intellect. When thus we fear to quench 



344 



LO ! GOD IS HERE ! 



his spirit, God will not suffer our time to be a dreary 
and unconsecrated thing. Swept by the very borders 
of his garment, we shall not look far for his glorify- 
ing presence. The poorest outward condition will do 
nothing to obliterate the solmnity from life. Nay of 
f nothing may we be more sure than this ; that if we 
cannot sanctify our present lot, we could sanctify no 
other. Our heaven and our almighty Father are 
there or nowhere. The obstructions of that lot are 
given for us to heave away by the concurrent touch of 
a holy spirit, and labor of strenuous will; its gloom, 
for us to tint with some celestial light ; its mysteries 
are for our worship; its sorrows for our trust; its 
perils for our courage ; its temptations for our faith. 
Soldiers of the cross, it is not for us, but for our 
Leader and our Lord, to choose the field; it is ours, 
taking the station which he assigns, to make it the 
field of truth and honor, though it be the field of 
death. 

It is a part of the illusion, which contrasts us with 
Paul, that we esteem God to be without us, rather 
than within us ; a mode of conception which I believe 
to be ultimately fatal to that religious life, from the 
incipient feebleness of which it originally springs. 
What has been really meant by those devout men 
who have freely spoken of God's communion with 
them, and of the thoughts which he has put into the 
heart? That these thoughts did actually arise and 
must be accepted as facts, will hardly be denied. 
Nor will it be doubted that, in the thinker's view, they 
appeared most high and solemn ; and that in no other 
way could their beauty and authority be expressed, 
than by calling them emanations from the supreme 
Source of the binding and beautiful. To affirm the 



LO ! GOD IS HEBE ! 



345 



the purest and deepest movements of our nature to be 
from God, is the natural utterance of full reverence 
for them ; to deny their origin from him, is a distinct 
profession that that reference has declined; they are 
sought for at a lower source, because they have de- 
scended to a meaner place. And while this denial 
Indicates a fainter piety, it is no sign of stronger 
reason. What emboldens you to contradict the 
universal testimony of souls aloft in worship, — the 
natural language of poet, saint, and prophet ? How 
do you know that in the affections that most glorify 
their hearts, there is no immediate light of Heaven ? 
You say, perhaps, they are experiences by the wor- 
shipper's own mind, and must be parts of the nature 
that feels them. But it does not follow that, because 
they are included in the consciousness of men, they 
indicate no presence and living touch of God. Or 
you say, there is no miracle in them, and they come 
and go by laws not quite untraceable. But this only 
shows that the divine agency, if there, is free from dis- 
order and caprice, and loves to be constant in behalf 
of those who are faithful to its conditions. Or do 
you complain of the idle fanaticism, which often have 
preferred this tempting claim ? Idle they may be to 
you, to whose mind they stand in quite different re- 
lation ; but not perhaps to those whom assuredly 
they raise to higher life. We are not all alike ; and 
God does not exist for any miserable egotist alone. 
We are all indeed set in one infinite sphere of uni- 
versal reason and conscience ; but scattered over it to 
follow separate circles, and attain every variety of 
altitude in faith. Like stars upon the same meridian, 
whose culminating points cannot be alike, we touch 
our supreme height at different elevations ; and the 



346 



EO ! GOD is here! 



measure which is far down on the course of one 
mind, may be the acme of religion in another. And it 
is as worthy of God to lift every soul to the ethereal 
summit proper to it, as to roll the heavens, and call 
forth their lights by interval and number, and see 
that 'not one faileth.' And as there is no ground in 
experience for rejecting the old language of devotion, 
neither is there any in the claim of consistent philos- 
ophy. We find men ready enough to allow that 
there is no place where God is not, perhaps no time 
when his external power is not active in some realm 
or other. And why then withhold from him that in- 
ternal and spiritual sphere of which all else is but the 
theatre and the temple ? What can dead space want 
with the divine presence, compared with the ever- 
perilled soul of man, perpetually trembling on the 
verge of grief or sin ? Shall we coldly speculate on 
the physical Omnipresence of the Infinite, and ques- 
tion the ubiquity of his moral power? — diffuse him 
as an atmosphere, and forget that he is a Mind ? — 
plead for his mechanical action on matter, and doubt 
the contact of spirit with spirit? — admit the agency 
of the artist on his work, and deny the embrace of 
the Father and the child ? It were indeed strange, 
if this anomaly were true. Where is this blessed 
object of our worship, if not within our souls? What 
possible ground is there for affirming him to be else- 
where and not here ? Far more plausible would the 
limitation be, if we were to declare him manifestly 
existent here alone. All external things are appre- 
hensible by sense, and it is to discover the outward 
creation that the senses are given. All internal 
things are apprehended by thought, and it is to seize 
this far higher order of realities, that thought is 



LO ! GOD IS HEBE ! 



347 



given. Never was eye or ear made perceptive of 
Deity; ' no man hath heard his voice at any time or 
seen his form ;' he is the object of simply spiritual 
discernment, the holy image, mysteriously shaped 
forth from the quarries of our purest thought, and 
glowing with life, beauty and power, in the inmost 
sanctuary of the mind. And his reality there is a 
certainty of the same rank as the existence of the 
universe without. There is truth then, and only a 
wise enthusiasm, in the established strains of Chris- 
tian piety; invoking the presence of the Holiest to 
the soul as his loved retreat, and humbly referring to 
him the purest thoughts and best desires. I pretend 
not to draw the untraceable line that separates his 
being from ours. The decisions of the Will, doubt- 
less, are our own, and constitute the proper sphere of 
our personal agency. But in a region higher than 
the Will, — the realm of spontaneous thought and 
emotion, — there is scope enough for his 'abode 
with us.' Whatever is most deep within us is the 
reflection of himself. All our better love, and higher 
aspirations, are the answering movements of our na- 
ture in harmonious obedience to his spirit. What- 
ever dawn of blessed sanctity, and wakening of 
purer perceptions, opens on our consciousness, are 
the sweet touch of his morning light within us. His 
inspiration is perenial ; and he never ceases to work 
within us, if we consent to will and to do his good 
pleasure. He befriends our moral efforts ; encourages 
us to maintain our resolute fidelity and truth ; accepts 
our co-operation with his designs against all evil; 
and reveals to us many things far too fair and deep 
for language to express. But, while he is thus 
prompt to come with his Spirit to the help of seeking 



348 



LO! GOD IS HEUeI 



hearts, he is expelled by the least unfaithfulness; and ** 
when the ' spirit of truth ' is driven away, this holy 
' Comforter' no longer remains. To receive the pro- 
mise, we must deserve the prayer, of Christ, — that 
we 4 may be kept from the evil,' and ' sanctified 
through the truth.' Finding a Holy of Holies with- 
in us, we need not curiously ask whether its secret 
voices are of ourselves or of the Father. Christ felt 
how, within the deeps of our spiritual nature, the 
personalities of Heaven and earth might become 
entwined together and indissolubly blended : ' Thou, 
Father, art in me, and I in Thee, and they also one 
in us.' And so, the Holy Spirit within us, the spirit 
of Christ, and the spirit of God, are after all but one ; 
— a blessed Trinity, our part in which gives to our 
souls a dignity most humbling yet august. 



XXVIII. 



CHRISTIAN SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS. 
Genesis nr. 22. 

AND THE LORD GOD SAID, BEHOLD, THE MAN IS BECOME AS ONE OP 
US, TO KNOW GOOD AND EYIL. 

It is a favorite doctrine of one of the wisest 
thinkers of our day, that i if Adam had remained in 
Paradise, there had been no anatomy, and no meta- 
physics.' In other words, it is only on the lapse 
from the state of health, that we find we have a 
body ; and on the loss of innocence, that we become 
conscious of a soul. Disease and wrong are the 
awakers of our reflection; they bring our outward 
pursuits to a pause, and force us to look within ; and 
the extent of our self-study and self-knowledge may 
be taken as a measure of the depth to which the 
poison of evil has penetrated into our frame. The 
man who, instead of being surrendered to spontane- 
ous action, voluntarily retires to think, has fallen sick, 
and can effect no more. The art which has recov- 
ered from its trance of inspiration and found out that 
it has rules, begins to manufacture and ceases to 
create. The literature which directs itself to an end, 
and critically seeks the means, may yield the produce 
of ingenuity, but not the fruit of genius. The society 
which understands its own structure, talks of its 
30 



350 



CHRISTIAN SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS. 



grievances, plumes itself on its achievements, and pre- 
scribes for its own case, is already in a state of in- 
evitable decadence. And the religion which has 
begun to inquire, to sift out its errors, and treasure 
up its truths, has lost its breath of healthy faith, and 
only gasps in death. With sighs and irresistible 
longings, does this noble writer look back upon 
imaginary ages of involuntary heroism, when the 
great and good knew not their greatness and good- 
ness, and genius was found which was a secret to 
itself, and men lived for God's sake, instead of for 
their own. Could he realize his dream of perfection, 
he would stock the world with activity, and fill it 
with men who know not what they do. 

This celebrated paradox could never occupy a 
mind like Mr. Carlyle's, did it not envelop an impor- 
tant and seasonable truth. But before we give our- 
selves up to the despondency it must inspire, it is as 
well to see whether there is no illusion in its sadness ; 
and whether its pathetic complaints may not even be 
turned, by an altered modulation, into a hymn of 
thanksgiving. 

To sigh after an unconscious life, — what is it but 
to protest against the very poiver of thought ? To 
think is not merely to have ideas, — to be the theatre 
across which images and emotions are marched ; — 
but to sit in the midst as master of one's concep- 
tions; to detain them for audience, or dismiss them 
at a glance ; to organize them into coherence and di- 
rect them to an end. It implies at every step the me- 
mory and deliberate review of past states of mind, the 
voluntary estimate of them, and control over them. 
It is a royal act in which we possess the objects 
which engage us, and are not possessed by them. 



CHRISTIAN SELF- CONSCIOUSNESS. 



351 



It is an act of intense self-consciousness, whose whole 
energy consists in this, that the mind is kindled by- 
seeing itself, as if the light were to become sensitive, 
and turn also to vision. 

Again, to sigh for an unconscious life, is to protest 
against Conscience. For what is this faculty but, 
as its name denotes, a knoivledge with one's self of 
the worth and excellence of the several principles of 
action by which we are impelled ? Shall we desire 
to be impelled by them still, only remaining in the 
dark as to their value and our obligations ? — to be 
the creature of each, as its turn may come, without 
choice between the baser and the nobler, or percep- 
tion of difference between appetite and inspiration ? 
Duty implies, in every form, that a man is entrusted 
with himself; that he is expected to overlook and 
direct himself ; to maintain therefore an open eye on 
the spiritual world within, and preserve throughout a 
sacred order. 

And once more, to pray for an unconscious life, is 
to desire an incapacity for Faith. For what is faith, 
but trust in an Infinite and Holy One, of whom 
we could have no conception, if our aspirations 
did not transcend our realities; if the ideal faculty 
did not survey the actual and find it wanting? 
Our own spirit is the vestibule which we must 
enter, as threshold to the temple of the Eternal, 
and wherein alone we can catch any whisper from 
the Holy of Holies. A man who had never found 
his soul, could assuredly never see his God. 

Scarcely can we admit a theory to be true, which 
implies that Thought, Duty, Will, and Faith, are so 
many diseases in our constitution, over which it be- 
comes us to weep the tears of protestation. These, 



352 



CHRISTIAN SELF-CONSCIOTJSNESS. 



and the self-consciousness which renders us capable 
of them, are the supreme glory of our nature : raising 
it above the mere instinctive life of the brute creation, 
making it agent as well as instrument, and giving it 
two worlds to live in instead of one. 

If, however, this power of self-consciousness be as- 
signed to us as our special dignity and strength, it 
may be turned to our weakness and our shame. The 
peculiar faculty in man, of overlooking himself, is but 
the needful condition and natural preparation for an- 
other — that of directing himself. Why show him 
his place, but that he may choose his way ? Why 
wake him up, — alone of all creatures, — if the night- 
mare of necessity is to sit upon him still ? If his 
course be determined for him, and not by him, why 
not lock him fast, like all similar natures, in the in- 
terior of his perceptions and impulses, as in the 
scenery of a dream, instead of carrying him outside 
to survey them ? A thing that is at the disposal of 
foreign forces, that is moved hither and thither by laws 
imposed upon it, would plainly be none the better 
for the gift of self-knowledge. If the planet, urged 
through an inflexible orbit by determinate mechanism, 
were made aware of its own history, no hair's breadth 
of guidance would the revelation give. If the tree 
could study its own physiology, its growth would be 
no nobler, and its fruit no fairer. If the animal 
could scrutinize its instincts, they would perform no 
new function, and afford no happier guidance. And 
if man can superintend his own mind it is because he 
is not like the planet, the tree, the brute, the mere 
theatre on which forces display themselves, but a 
fresh power in himself, able to originate action in 
the same sense in which God originates the universe. 



CHRISTIAN SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS. 353 

Every sentient being perceives enough for its own 
direction ; if you look round the circle of its percep- 
tions, you ascertain the sources of its guidance. 
Animals, that are at the exclusive disposal of the 
external objects related to them, are alive to the ex- 
ternal world alone. Man, capable of withstanding 
extrinsic agencies, and having a creative centre with- 
in him, is alive to his own soul as well. Shut us 
fast up in the line of nature, and nature is all that we 
want to know. Set us free to stand above nature, 
and live with an upper region of the spirit stretching 
beyond her realm, not subject only but also Lord, and 
we need for the first time that self-consciousness 
which is the condition of liberty, and the first element 
of wisdom. It is because we have a work of choice 
assigned us, because we are entrusted with the power 
to control our instincts, and subject the spontaneous 
natural life to the voluntary and spiritual, that we 
alone have the faculty of reflection. It is the superior 
light awarded to our special obligations. Self-con- 
sciousness, thus superadded to our mere sentient na- 
ture, becomes, by this association, not less our tempta- 
tion than our dignity. If pain and pleasure constituted 
the ultimate interests of life, we could dispense with 
the attribute of self-inspection as well as the brutes ; 
in short, we should be in that case but a nobler sort 
of brute, differing from other species only in having 
more numerous resources for our sensitive nature, — 
a richer table spread for more varied appetites, of 
the palate or of the mind. Senses, however multi- 
plied ; taste, however exquisite ; capacities for enjoy- 
ment never so fine, — want no faculty of reflection, 
and must know that it is not for them. But while it 
is not for their sakes, it is of necessity in their pres- 
30* 



354 



CHRISTIAN- SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS. 



ence, and within their hearing, that the arcana of life 
are revealed to us. Appetite and Conscience, like 
two spirits of the lower and upper world, live to- 
gether in the same house, so that the revelation made 
for one is little likely to remain secret from the other; 
and it is in the power of the fiend to steal the privity 
of the angel, and break the seals of the divinest 
message. Hence there comes about an impious 
abuse of the god-like gift of self-conscious life ; and 
instead of serving as the handmaid of duty, it is. de- 
graded into the pander of appetite. Nothing can be 
baser than this sweet poisoning of moral truth for the 
relish of sin. Thus to use our human secret as a 
cunning way of getting an advantage over the brutes, 
is a downright betrayal of the confidence of God, — 
a bartering in Hell of that which we have overheard 
in Heaven. 

This faculty, then, of reflection upon himself, his life, 
his nature, his relations, is the peculiarity which, in 
proportion as it becomes marked, places a man at a 
distance from the brutes. When applied to its true 
purpose of surveying his responsibilities, judging his 
modes of activity and affection, and enforcing a 
Christian order throughout his soul, it becomes a god- 
like prerogative, and lifts him to angel life. When 
perverted to a false purpose of prying into his passive 
sensations, and discovering the means of getting drunk 
with instinctive pleasures, and turning the healthy 
hunger of nature into the feverish greed of Epicurism, 
it becomes a fallen spirit, and allies its possessor with 
the fiends. Man, the self-conscious animal, is the sad- 
dest spectacle in creation ; man, the self-conscious 
Christian, one of the noblest. Reflecting vitality is 
hypochondria and disease ; reflecting spirituality is 
clearness and strength. 



CHRISTIAN SELF- CONSCIOUSNESS. 



355 



This general doctrine has a direct bearing upon a 
question which is often raised, and which presses upon 
the attention of the present age with an anxious ear- 
nestness ; — What is the effect on human character 
of a high and complicated civilization ? Are its vast 
accumulations of commodities, its rapid circulation of 
activity and thought, its minute division of employ- 
ments, its close interlacing of interests, its facilities for 
class-organization, to be looked upon with joy and 
gratulation, as so many triumphs of intelligence and 
refinement over ignorance and barbarism ; or with 
grief and consternation, as the gathering of an uncon- 
trollable and aimless power destined, like the mad 
Hercules, to destroy the offspring of its strength ? The 
exulting and jubilant feeling on this matter which 
prevailed some years ago, is now generally replaced, 
I believe, in thoughtful minds, by a more sober and 
even melancholy order of expectations. The change 
may be justified, if it be made a step, not to passive 
despair, but to the faithful and energetic performance 
of a new class of social duties. Let us search for 
some principle which may aid in the solution of this 
great problem. 

The specific effect on human character produced 
by a high state of civilization may be expressed in a 
single phrase; it develops the self-consciousness of 
men to an intense degree, or, to borrow the venerable 
language of Scripture, immeasurably increases their 
"knowledge of good and evil." This indeed arises 
necessarily from our living so closely in the presence 
of each other. A perfectly solitary being, who had a 
whole planet to himself, would remain, I suppose, 
forever incapable of knowing himself and reflecting 
upon his thoughts and actions. He would continue, 



356 



CHRISTIAN SELF- CONSCIOUSNESS. 



like other creatures, to have feeling and ideas, but 
would not make them his objects and bring them 
under his Will. This human peculiarity would re- 
main latent in him, till he was introduced before 
the face of some kindred being, and he saw his 
nature reflected in another mind. Looking into the 
eyes of a living companion, changing with laughter 
and with tears, flashing with anger, drooping with 
sleep, he finds the mirror of himself; the passions 
of his inner life are revealed to him ; and he becomes 
a person instead of a living' thing. In proportion as 
society collects more thickly around a man, this prim- 
itive change deepens and extends ; the unconscious, 
instinctive life, which remains predominant in savage 
tribes, and visible enough in spare populations every- 
where, gradually retires. He knows all about his appe- 
tites, and how to serve them; can name his feelings, 
reign them, stifle them; can manage his thoughts, fly 
from them, conceal them; can meditate his actions, 
link them into a system, protect them from interrupt- 
ing impulse, and direct them to an end; can go 
through the length and breadth of life with mind gross- 
ly familiar with its wonders, or reverently studious 
of its wisdom ; and look on Death with the eye of an 
undertaker, or through the tears of a saint. In an old 
and artificial community, all the common products of 
experience appear stale and exhausted, and ingenuity 
is plied for the means of awakening some new emotion. 
The inmost recesses of our nature are curiously ex- 
plored, and its most sacred feelings submitted to the 
coolest criticism, and brought under the canons of art. 
The self-consciousness of individuals is shared by so- 
ciety at large ; it studies itself, talks of its past, is 
anxious about its future; becomes aware of its own 



CHKISTIAN SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS. 



357 



mechanism, and tries to estimate its strength. And 
with a universal discussion of wide social problems, 
an unparalleled egoism and isolation are apt to seize 
upon every sect, class, and nation. 

If this be true, then we must admit that a high 
civilization unfolds the characteristic endowment of 
our nature ; and so far, may be said to raise and dig- 
nify it, and leave far behind the mere animal and 
instinctive life which belongs to beings of lower 
grade. The most ignorant man in England pos- 
sesses a knowledge of good and evil, and a various 
skill in commanding them, which the hoariest patri- 
arch in a barbarian village would look upon with awe. 

It is only however in the Naturalist's scale, not in 
the Christian, that man is elevated by the influences 
of artificial society. He becomes a well marked speci- 
men of his kind, broadly separated from other races 
upon earth ; but how he ranks among spiritual beings, 
— whether he approaches the confines of heaven, or 
touches the verge of hell, — is wholly undecided still. 
Superior knowledge of good and evil involves no 
change in the proportionate love of them; self-con- 
sciousness being a neutral faculty, the condition alike 
of whatever is pure and noble, and of all that is most 
foul and mean; the ground at once of the fidelity of 
Abdiel and the guilt of Lucifer. Hence it is that the 
mere progress of civilization involves no spiritual 
advance, and miserably disappoints those who trust- 
ed that it was to deliver men from the yoke of their 
follies and their sins. Vast as is the spectacle of our 
material magnificence, and intense as may be the 
traces of mental vitality, there is no certain decline of 
selfishness and corruption in any class; or if on the 
right hand you can point to some evil extinguished, 



358 



CHRISTIAN SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS. 



on the left there springs some new enormity to 
balance the success. How many are there who base- 
ly avail themselves of all the ease and luxury of our 
complicated civilization, compared with the few who 
feel its obligations, and take up its work ! How little 
security do the most practised thought and refined 
scholarship seem to afford against shameful Jesuitry 
and abject superstition ! And how often is the nimble 
intelligence of the artisan wholly unproductive of 
any self-restraint or reverence ! The mere cleverness 
indeed of the modern townsman, derived from the 
heated and sensitive atmosphere around him, implies 
no hardy spiritual life within him, and ensures no 
moral thoughtfulness or wisdom. It is a mere apti- 
tude for the germination of ideas of any sort ; where- 
by flowers of Paradise may come sprouting up without 
ripening their proper fruits, or the deadly nightshade 
drop its poison un perceived. Intellectual irritability 
may leave the conscience wholly dead. And assured- 
ly only that knowledge which a man wins for himself 
by the spontaneous efforts of his own mind has the 
proper and purifying effect of truth on him, and 
renders his nature clearer than it was before. 

And unhappily this self-acquired knowledge and 
faculty are, in one respect, less likely to be found 
among us in these days than of old. The direct in- 
fluence of occupation is less and less favorable to 
their production. Nothing that has ever been ad- 
vanced by economists can convince me, that the 
extreme division of employments, which characterizes 
modern industrial operations, is anything but deaden- 
ing and unhealthy to the mental nature of those en- 
gaged in them. To spend every working day of half 
or the whole of life, not in a craft of various nicety 



CHRISTIAN SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS. 



359 



and skill, but in a solitary process of a single manu- 
facture, in tying threads or pointing pins, can assur- 
edly give no discipline to any faculty, unless those of 
muscular alacrity or mental patience ; and compared 
with the work of an earlier world, I should as little 
call this skill, as I should class among literary men a 
scribe who should devote his time to crossing f s and 
dotting f s. With long habit the monotony of such a 
lot may cease to be positively felt. But it taxes no 
worthy power, it enlists no natural interest, it pre- 
sents only vacancy and listlessness to the thought, 
and the more so, as the work is another's and not 
the laborer's own. The occupation does not educate 
the man. It may be true, in point of fact, that 
workers of this class are as intelligent as others. 
But if so, this is owing to influences extrinsic to the 
cause on which I dwell, and in spite of it ; especially 
to their residence in the stimulant atmosphere of 
great cities, and the habit of association with large 
bodies of men. And this intellectual counteraction 
itself, there is reason to fear, is purchased at the cost 
of vast moral dangers. For, in proportion as men 
cease to have an intelligent interest in their work, and 
go through it with the weariness of a necessary task, 
do they quit it with a susceptibility to foreign excite- 
ments, and a more open avidity for the temptations 
of the passions ; and losing the even glow of a con- 
stant activity, they fall under fearful inducement to 
alternate the stagnant blood of dulness with the 
throbbing pulse of revelry. 

Who then can be so blind as to deny the dangers 
amid which we live ? We have created around us a 
scale of opportunity, and temptation, and risk, fright- 
fully vast. We are wholly out of reach of the narrow 



360 



CHRISTIAN SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS. 



safety of simple and instinctive life. We stand in the 
presence of a gigantic amount of good and evil. Yet 
we have not stronger spirits to bear the mightier 
strain. So far as our condition forms us, we are less 
complete men, and therefore of less massive stability, 
than were our forefathers. The moral structure of so- 
ciety partakes of the character of those huge machines 
which have done so much to make at once its wealth 
and weakness ; each man being but as a screw or 
pinion of the whole, locked into a system that holds 
him fast or whirls him on, and having no longer a 
separate symmetry and worth. The results, indeed, 
which are turned out from this involuntary co-opera- 
tion of parts, are of overwhelming magnitude and 
wonderful variety. Our country is a vast congeries 
of exaggerations. Enormous wealth and saddest 
poverty, sumptuous idleness and saddest toil, princely 
provison for learning, and the most degrading igno- 
rance, a large amount of laborious philanthropy, but 
a larger of unconquered misery and sin, subsist side 
by side, and terrify us by the preternatural contrast 
of brilliant coloring with blackest shade. It is ap- 
palling to think of the moral cost (a cost most need- 
less too) at which England has become materially 
great. Do you found that greatness on the culture of 
the soil ? Alas ! where is the laborer by whose hand 
it has been tilled ? In a cabin with his children, 
where the domestic decencies cannot be, and where 
Christ, did he enter, might give his pity, but could 
hardly ask obedience. Or do you point rather to our 
mineral wealth ? See the picture which has scarcely 
ceased to be true, of crawling women and harnessed 
children, of whose toil this glory comes ? I know not 
which is most Heathenish, the guilty negligence of 



CHRISTIAN SELF- CONSCIOUSNESS. 



361 



our lofty men, or the fearful degradation of the low. 
But this I do believe, that unless some holier spirit 
dart quickly down for the conversion of our rich and 
great, put into them a wise and Christian heart, and 
dispose them to sacrifices never dreamt of yet ; our 
social repentance will come too late, and we shall die 
with our Jerusalem, seeing only the image of a tear- 
ful Christ, and hearing the words, ' O that thou 
hadst known, at least in this thy day, the things that 
belong to thy peace ! ' 

Moreover, we live, as we have seen, in an age of 
excited and self-conscious men. And in all minds 
awakened and reflective, to even a very moderate 
degree, there arises and accumulates a secret fund of 
dissatisfaction ; a dark, mysterious speck of care 
upon the heart, which turns to a point of explosive 
ruin in bad men, to a seed of fruitful sorrow with the 
good. The natural mind, untouched by religious wis- 
dom, always refers its wants and miseries to outward 
things, which alone it strives to mend and change. 
So this hidden discontent leads men to love them- 
selves the more, and quarrel with their neighbors, 
until they become Christians in soul ; and then it 
shows them a far higher truth, and leads them to love 
their neighbors and reproach themselves. The strife 
and struggle which are inseparable from our self-con- 
scious life, are directed to mutual hate, while under 
the guidance of self; to common aspiration, under 
the discipline of Christ. Who can doubt that, under 
our present spiritual condition, it is the anarchy, and 
not the love, to which this feeling tends ? And who 
would not pray for an infusion of the light of God to 
paint the bow of peace and promise on the cloud 
where the muffled thunder growls ? Oh ! that to us, 

31 



362 



CHRISTIAN SELF- CONSCIOUSNESS. 



otherwise than to Elijah in the cave, it maybe given 
to hear the still small voice, not after, but before, the 
strong wind, the earthquake, and the fire. 

To avert the dangers, and remedy the peculiar evils 
of our social condition, many conjoint agencies are 
doubtless required. But there is not one whose neg- 
lect offers more certain peril, whose right and timely 
application presents more reasonable hope, than a 
Christian training for the new generation of our 
people. Could this, indeed, be universally given, 
could all good men set to work with one heart and 
hand, and see to it that no desert spot be un- 
reclaimed, all would yet be well. But, alas ! we are 
so afraid of each other's doctrines, that we cannot 
cure each other's sins ; and while the most appalling 
evils threaten us, and more than once the symp- 
tomatic smoke has puffed up from the social volcano, 
we stand round the crater and discuss theology? 
Ah ! how much more is there in our Christendom, of 
the contentious mind, than of the disciple's pure and 
unperverted heart! Which, I would know, is the 
worse evil, an actual gin-shop, or a possible heresy ? 
Yet in dread of the latter, we cannot unite together 
in the only means of putting down the former. How- 
ever, by such means as our infirmities still leave open, 
we must go and teach this people. In proportion as 
their occupations educate them less, and their circum- 
stances tempt them more, a direct and proposed cul- 
ture must be provided ; — a culture which keeps in 
view the great primary end of responsible existence ; 
which looks not at their trade, but at their souls, and 
brings them not as apt servants to the mill, but as 
holy children to their God. Education in the Chris- 
tian sense, is truly everlasting; childhood preparing 



CHRISTIAN SELF-CONSCIOTJSNESS. 



363 



for maturity, maturity for age, and the whole of life 
for death and Heaven. The early training of the 
young is but that portion of this series, which prepares 
for self-government and the exercise of Free-will 
within the limits of Christ's law. Doubtless the 
responsibility of this task rests, by the decree of Na- 
ture and Providence, with the parents to whom the 
young life is committed as a trust ; nor will it ever 
have settled on its genuine basis, till there shall exist, 
in every class, an effective domestic sentiment, suffi- 
cient to sustain it. But amid the wide decay of the 
old and healthful parental conscience, it becomes 
needful to awaken a wider interest in the work, and 
to call upon neighborhood and country to take up the 
neglected office of the home. Nor should any indi- 
vidual, or any family, exempt from the constant cares 
of subsistence, be held to have discharged obligations 
of the Christian life, till they freely give some steady 
help to this essential work ; and provide some fitting 
care for the neglected child, as still an infant disciple 
claimed by the arms, and consecrated by the benedic- 
tion, of their heavenly Lord. 



XXIX. 



THE UNCLOUDED HEART. 
John y. 30. 

my judgment is just, because i seek not mine own will, but 
the will oe the eather which hath sent me 

For the training of goodness, the ancient reliance 
was on the right discipline of habit and affection; 
the modern is rather on illumination of the under- 
standing. The notion extensively prevails that vice, 
being only the mistaken pursuit of that personal 
happiness for which virtue is an equal but more 
sagacious aspirant, is a blunder of the intellect; a 
defective or erroneous view of things ; and, like the 
optical delusions incident to weak eyes, to be cured 
by use of the most approved instruments for seeing 
clearly. The guilty and degraded will, it is said, dif- 
fers from the pure and noble, not by aiming at a less 
innocent end, but by being less happy in its choice of 
means ; point out the miscalculation, instruct it to 
weigh causes with greater nicety in future; and you 
cannot fail to promote the needful reformation. The 
sinner is but the most deplorable of fools ; and if you 
banish folly, you extinguish sin. 

This prescription for the advancement of human ex- 
cellence possesses an apparent simplicity, which gives 
it a great attraction to some minds. All the varieties 
of character among men it reduces to an arrange- 



THE UNCLOUDED HEAHT. 



365 



ment easily understood ; distributing them along a 
single line, in the order of their intelligence. It seems 
to take away ail mystery from the moral motions, 
whose rapidity and intensity had awed and startled 
us ; and by converting them into plain judgments of 
the intellect, makes them the voice of man instead of 
God. Unhappily, however, the value of this tempt- 
ing theory disappears, the moment we seek to use it. 
Let its most ingenious advocate try it upon the miser, 
the cheat, the insane candidate for glory ; let him 
reason with them on their ignorance and imbecility 
of judgment, expose every fallacy of self-justification, 
and establish against them an unanswerable case of 
mistake ; and then let him come and tell us, whether 
he has made them generous, just and meek. Per- 
haps he will confess his failure, but persevere in 
ascribing it to the unhappy state of his pupils' under- 
standing, rather than any distinct affection of their 
passions. 4 1 could not convince them,' he will say, 
4 of their error; or, if my arguments impressed them 
at the moment, the persuasion passed away ; and 
habit proved the more successful advocate, because 
it was, though not the truer, yet the more impor- 
tunate.' But were not your appeals just and for- 
cible, and your instruction indisputably true? Then 
there must be something in the heart where evil 
passions dwell, that baffles the chance of reason ; 
that takes from evidence its natural force, and gives 
to error an unmerited triumph. And what advantage 
do we gain by representing men as the subjects, and 
their morality as truths, of the pure intellect, if it be 
an intellect that may lose its distinguishing function, 
and become inaccessible to just persuasion ? What 
comfort is it to know that guilt is only error, if it be 

31* 



366 



THE UNCLOUDED HEART. 



error so peculiar as to be insensible to the merits 
of the most unquestionable proof? Why tell us 
that right and wrong are but the love of happiness 
making its computations, when it is admitted that 
passion was never computed out of the heart, and 
that self-interest itself is whiffed away by the tem- 
pest of its rage ? It is true, that you have only to 
give the slave of guilty passions a different view of 
the objects of desire, and he is set free from his 
miserable thraldom. It is equally true, that you 
have only to make the collapsed paralytic start up 
and run, — and he will be well. 

No doubt, the weakest reason and the most ungov- 
ernable desires are constantly found together. But 
there are at least two ways of reading connected 
appearances like these. The attempt to resolve all 
the phenomena of character into a condition of the 
understanding is a futile exaggeration. The great 
author of Christianity, reversing the order of the ex- 
planation, placed the truth in a juster point of view. 
He well knew that if, sometimes, because the reason 
is darkened, the passions are awake, it more often 
happens that because the passions are awake, the 
reason is eclipsed. To him it could not but be clear, 
from consciousness itself, that pure sympathies make 
a clear intellect, and with their sweet breath, wonder- 
fully open to the mind new perceptions of things 
heavenly. While auditors, feeling ' that never man 
spake like this man,' asked, ' how knoweth he letters, 
having never learned ? ' Jesus led them to a different 
explanation of his wisdom. ' My judgment is just, 
because I seek not mine own will, but the will of the 
Father who hath sent me.' And he instructed others 
how to gain a like discernment of things divine, 



THE TJX CLOUDED HEART. 



367 



when he said, ' If any will do Ids will, he shall know 
of the doctrine, whether it be of God, or whether I 
speak of myself.' The words express a universal 
truth. Whatever be the work on which the judgment 
may be engaged, it will be invariably aided by the 
natural sympathies of a just, disinterested and holy 
mind. 

Even in his abstruser toils, these are often the wise 
man's mightiest power. The most turbid clouds that 
darken the vision of reason are those which interest, 
and fear, and ambition spread ; and these the pure 
affections sweep away. They give to the soul the 
unspeakable freedom of just intents and elevated 
trusts; and where there exist no complicated aims, no 
retarding anxieties, but the whole absolute energy of 
a mind is gathered upon the search of truth, it is 
amazing what vast achievements may be made. 
How often will a child, by mere force of uncon- 
sciousness and simplicity, penetrate to the centre of 
some great truth with a startling ease and directness. 
And in this the greatness of genius is like the power 
of a child; it is as much moral as intellectual; it 
arises from emotions so distinct and earnest as to 
secure singleness of purpose and vivacity of expres- 
sion ; from some absorbing reverence which disen- 
thrals the mind from lower passions, and gives it 
courage to be true. There is always a presumption 
that a pure-hearted will be a right-minded man ; and 
it is delightful to see such a one stand up before the 
ambitious sophist, and dart on his ingenuities a clear 
ray of conscience that scatters them like mist. The 
divine light of a good mind is too much for the 
mystifications of guilt. 6 The foolishness of God is 
wiser than the wisdom of men.' 



368 



THE UNCLOUDED HEART. 



All the great hindrances to impartiality in the 
quest of truth have obviously their seat in some class 
of selfish feelings. Interest, promising to one set of 
opinions emolument and honor, and to their opposite 
poverty and disgrace ; or passing over to the future 
world, and there displaying to us the alternative of 
absolute blessedness or ruin, — crushes the natural 
justice of the understanding, and offers stupendous 
temptations to palter with evidence, and shuffle in- 
convenient doubts away. No inquirer can fix a 
direct and clear-sighted gaze towards truth, who is 
casting side-glances all the while on the prospects of 
his soul. Again, the excessive eagerness about repu- 
tation produces a thousand pitiable distortions of 
understanding. In one it takes the shape of a deter- 
mination to be original (which, I suppose, never befell 
any man by deliberate resolve), and so extinguishes 
his perception of all ancient excellence, and confines 
his appreciation to his own obscurities and affecta- 
tions. In another it passes into an opposite folly, — 
the pride of being peculiarly moderate and sound; so 
he dreads eccentricities far more than falsehoods, and 
weighs proprieties, instead of investigating truths. 
And what is the partisanship that wearies every 
good man's heart, but a collection of selfish feelings, 
fatal to all the equities of reason ; a gross association 
of the idea of self with abstract questions? It is said 
to be of service in keeping alive the mental activity 
of the community; but how poor a service, when the 
activity consists so largely in the ferment of bad pas- 
sions; and conducts the tranquil tasks of reason in 
the spirit of a gamester. Argument, in such case, loses 
its natural power of persuasion, and operates like a 
weapon of vengeance ; only raising higher the note of 



THE UNCLOUDED HEART. 



369 



triumph in those who wield it, and irritating instead 
of convincing the minds that it assails. Indeed it is 
humilating to think how poor a pittance of reasoning 
conducts the gigantic mutations of human senti- 
ment; how arguments, at which a quiet understand- 
ing would smile, rise to grave importance in the 
confusion of polemic rage; how light the sophistries 
which sway the tide of success when the hosts of 
party wrestle in the fight; how foolish the sounds 
which seem to award possession of that great capitol 
of opinion which overlooks the empire of the world. 

Though, however, narrow feelings and selfish de- 
sires, intruding on the province of the understanding, 
prevent its judgments from being just, it is not true 
that their simple absence constitutes the best state 
for speculative research. It is sometimes said, that, 
were it possible, the inquirer's mind should be abso- 
lutely emptied of every desire, and be exposed, in 
entire passiveness, to the action of evidence brought 
before its tribunal; that a being incapable of emotion, 
a mere machine for performing logical operations, 
would be the most efficient discoverer. But surely 
his impartiality, however perfect, would accomplish 
nothing without an impulse; intensity of intellectual 
action is needed, as well as clearness of intellectual 
view. And this will be most certainly found, not in 
one who follows the light without deep love of it ; 
not in one who simply finds it a personal conveni- 
ence, and desire it for its use; not even in one who 
has simply a relish for mental occupations, and pro- 
longs them from pure taste ; but in him who traverses 
the realm of thought, as if 1 seeking the will of One 
that sent him ; ' who reverently looks on the features 
of truth as on the face of God, and listens to its 



370 



THE UNCLOUDED HEART. 



accents as to his whispered oracle ; who trusts it with 
a 'love that casteth out fear,' and feels on him the 
blessed light of Heaven, when bigots pronounce him 
in a dreadful gloom. 

On questions of practical morals, yet more emphat- 
ically than on subjects of speculative research, is it 
true that pure sympathies produce a clear intellect, 
and that his judgments are most likely to be just, 
who most habitually seek the will of the eternal 
Father. The moral habits and tastes of men form 
their opinions, much more frequently than their opin- 
ions form their habits; — so that often their theoret- 
ical sentiments are little more than a systematic 
self-defence after the act, and afford an approximate 
index to the character of themselves and the society 
in which they live. The positions they assume hav- 
ing been taken up first, the reasons for maintaining 
them are discovered afterwards ; and it is surprising 
to observe the confidence with which questions of 
morals are discussed, as if on grounds of absolute 
philosophy, when every quiet observer perceives that 
the alleged premises would appear ridiculous except 
to persons already possessed of the conclusion. 
There is a test, — imperfect I admit, — by which to 
judge whether this is so or not, and to disenchant 
the imagination of the mere effect of usage. Any 
moral practice which admits of genuine defence, and 
has a permanent foundation in nature as well as in 
custom, might surely be recommended to an intelli- 
gent community hitherto ignorant of it, and success- 
fully urged upon their deliberate adoption. Yet how 
many things are we accustomed to palliate or up- 
hold, which we should be ashamed to submit to this 
criterion, and which the very act of expounding to 



THE UNCLOUDED HEART. 



371 



child or stranger would sufficiently condemn ! In 
how many societies are the misnamed laws of honor, 
for example, still justified, as if they satisfactorily 
met the conditions of a problem else insoluble! But 
if they be so sound and useful, it would be safe to 
try the argument in their behalf on those to whom 
the whole system of ideas is entirely new ; to preach 
the admirable wisdom of the duel to some tribe hav- 
ing only such civilization as may be attained without 
it ; and proselytize to it as if it were an a priori in- 
vention of philosophy. If the apostles of the world's 
law feel that in a mental clime so new, they would 
plead in vain, should they not suspect that they may 
be talking absurdities at home, which have no force 
but in the social prepossessions in their behalf? It 
is fearful to reflect, indeed, to what an extent our 
native moral sentiments are modified by the atmo- 
sphere of social influence perpetually spread around 
us ; how the indications of the unperverted conscience 
may become obscured and lost; and a fatal blind- 
ness and sleep disqualify it for its waking office. It 
is the natural mistake of just minds to believe it 
vigilant and incorruptible as God. When we fix our 
gaze on some dread crime ; when we see, it may be, 
the outrages of a tyrant's profligacy and vengeance, 
crushing the life of resolute purity, or consigning to 
the dungeon the virtue which it fears ; — under the 
impulse of poetic justice, we imagine the perpetrator 
secretly agonized by the consciousness of guilt; 
writhing at midnight beneath the lash of a fiery 
remorse, while his chained victim sleeps the light 
slumbers of innocence, and wakes with a brow cooled 
by the peace within. But we impose upon ourselves 
by a natural illusion ; we conceive a wretch to judge 



372 



THE UNCLOUDED HEART. 



himself by a good man's conscience, and to view his 
own deeds in a light which, had it been accessible to 
him, must at least have induced a hesitation about 
their commission. No, remorse is the attribute, not of 
the simply guilty, but of the fallen; it is the bitter 
memory which sin, yet fresh, retains of departed good- 
ness; the mind's convulsive grasp on the retreating 
purities of the past ; and, however vehemently it pro- 
tests against moral deterioration, the consolidated guilt 
of habit it lets alone. Shall any one then assure himself 
that all is right, because he is clear of compunction ? 
Shall he suffer his indulgent years to ebb idly away, 
because they are placid as the summer wave? Shall 
he thrust aside the pleadings of those who would 
kindle in him higher thoughts and brace him to 
nobler deeds, — by saying that he is comfortable and 
does not need them ? If so, he satisfies himself by 
the same argument which sophists use in defence of 
slavery; — the creatures are easy, have been seen to 
laugh merrily by day, and are known to sleep well at 
night. As if it were the whole life of man to have a 
sleek skin, and a drowsy brain. As if any existence 
upon ideas were not better than any without them ; 
and to perceive one's misery were not the best con- 
solation for its infliction ; and to aspire to a nobler 
existence, though with faintest hope, to chafe against 
the chain that binds us, though it gnaws our flesh, 
were not preferable to that most abject condition of 
humanity in which conscious degradation becomes 
impossible. We should beware, then, how we rely on 
this unconsciousness as a security. Of every low 
state of character, this apathy towards all that is 
above it, is the worst symptom. This torpor should 
not lull, but rather terrify. When this motionless 



THE UNCLOUDED HEAET. 



373 



repose reigns within, — this breathless atmosphere of 
the heart, — the freshness of health is no longer there ; 
it is the pestilent dreariness of the waste ; the awful 
silence of moral death*. 

In its judgment of human character, more even than 
in matters of personal morals, a mind under the 
governance of pure and disinterested affections will 
evince the clearest insight. He would be the most 
impartial spectator of the great theatre of human life, 
who should be raised into a sphere of pure contem- 
plation above its scenes ; to a position external to its 
competitions, its disappointments, its rewards ; where 
the voice of its restless multitudes floated but in 
whispers, articulate enough to report its passions 
with precision, but not thrilling enough to agitate the 
spirit by their power. Such an observer, acted on 
himself by no sympathies, bat those of conscience, 
— perfectly perspective, but entirely passionless, — 
would behold us in true relations and proportions. 
The pure affections create a mental position some- 
what similar to this. They still the confusion of the 
senses. They remove all motive for not seeing men 
and life exactly as they are. One who looks on the 
world as his appointed post of strenuous duty, and 
feels on him the divine charge to leave it better than 
he found it, must close neither eye nor heart against 
any of its ills. And as for its good, — for the charities 
that bless, the virtues that ennoble, the genius that 
illuminates our human lot, — delighting in them all, 
he discerns them all ; bringing to him as they do the 
refreshment of a generous veneration, what tempta- 
tion has he to doubt, decry, and disbelieve them ! In 
a mind where any selfish end habitually prevails, 
men are regarded as tools ; their services are wanted, 
32 



374 



THE UNCLOUDED HEART. 



and their complacency must be secured ; they are 
looked upon as objects of management, on whom 
the arts of influence must be tried. Hence the men- 
tal eye is insensibly trained to a sly and circumventing 
gaze upon our fellows ; the hand of cautious power 
steals forth, and makes a lever of their weaknesses ; 
the tongue encouraged by its first experiments of 
delicate insincerity, grows rash and voluble in flattery. 
And those whom a man is conscious of praising too 
much, he is sure to value too little. Accustomed to 
speak of good qualities which they do not possess, to 
invent merits of which they are empty, his mind is 
always dwelling on the negation of excellence, and 
growing familiar with it exclusively as an object of 
fiction ; till at length he ceases to believe in its real- 
ity, and attributes to everything human the hollow- 
ness which he practises himself. By the interposition 
of his own selfishness, the nobler half of human na- 
ture undergoes total and permanent eclipse. How 
should it be otherwise ? For who would spread the 
tender colors of the soul before an eye like his, where 
they can bask in no light of love ? Who would lay 
the head to rest on a bosom cold as marble ? Will 
any make confession of an unworldly aspiration to 
one, who keeps always ready some vile interpretation 
of whatever seems most excellent ; who sees in the 
pious only traders in hypocrisy, in the patriot a specu- 
lator in power, in the martyr a candidate for praise ? 
All that is beautiful shrinks from the presence of one 
who delights to soil it with instant dust. Oh, how 
unblest are they who have fallen into an incapacity 
to admire, and bid adieu to the solace of a deep 
reverence ; who can take up, without awe, the leaves 
scattered on the earth by departed genius, or read 



THE UNCLOUDED HEART. 



375 



of the struggles of liberty without enthusiasm, or fol- 
low the good in their pilgrimage of mercy, with- 
out the heavings of a mighty joy ! No grief deserves 
such pity as the privations of a scornful heart. 

Those who seek only their own, will lose, then, by 
natural process, the faculty of judging justly respect- 
ing human character. They are liable to fall into no 
less mistake in their anticipation of those changes in 
society which are brought about by the nobler forces 
of the human will. It is happy for the world, that 
over the vision of its greatest enemies their own self- 
ishness spreads a film, concealing from them, as in 
judicial blindness, the generous powers which will ef- 
fect their overthrow. Tyrants and self-seeking rulers 
are, by nature, Machiavelian moralists ; they have 
no faith but in the most vulgar incentives to action, 
and are familiar with no engines of influence but 
force and corruption. Accustomed to rely on these, 
they know not that there are emergencies, in which 
even a herd of slaves may be inspired with an 
enthusiasm that makes such implements of no avail ; 
— when high sentiments of social justice, or aspira- 
tions towards an invisible God, vibrate through the 
dull clay of ordinary men. Thus, often has the pam- 
pered despot been blinded to his fate, and led un- 
conscious on, like a decorated and sportive victim, to 
the sacrificial altar of a people's indignation. In spite 
of all his vigilance, conspiracy, conducted by lean and 
praying patriots, has gone unnoticed beneath his very 
eyes. While the sunshine smiles upon his palace, 
and glances from the swords of faithful troops, he 
despises the gathering cloud of a nation's frown ; till 
suddenly the tempest bursts upon the hills, and the 
heavy tramp, as of the men of toil, thunders on the 



376 



THE UNCLOUDED HEART. 



ground ; and after a flash of vented wrath, the vet- 
erans and their leader lay low upon the field, and the 
thanksgiving of the free goes up unto a sky serene. 
Thus it is of the very nature of guilty power to be 
surprised by the apparition of high-minded virtue in 
a people. And though the resistance it oners to the 
demands of conscience may, on this very account, be 
the more exasperated, and the vindication of an ab- 
stract right, like that of free worship, may cost a 
country the life of her best sons, we may yet be per- 
mitted to rejoice at the infatuation of selfish rule ; 
for even the sanguinary triumph of a great and 
righteous principle is often better than the sly and 
bloodless ascendancy of a bad one. War, with all 
its horrors, may be half forgotten in two generations ; 
but the rights which it may establish may give the 
causes of perennial peace. Men, at the best, must 
die as the grass; but the principles of justice are 
blessings for evermore. 

The selfish, then, in perpetually seeking their own 
will, and contemplating mankind chiefly as possible 
instruments for its accomplishment, necessarily over- 
look the best elements of our nature, and form judg- 
ments that are not just of human character, and its 
collective effects on the condition of the world. 
Moreover, while selfishness makes some men tools, it 
finds in others rivals; and under the form of jealousy, 
draws another cloud over the judgment, and hides 
from it all that is fairest in kindred minds. He that 
cannot enjoy, with genuine exultation, the reputation 
of another,, and admire with tranquil spirit the excel- 
lence that borders on his own, loses the best joy of 
a good heart. To the very merits which, from being 
most akin to his own. he is most fitted to appreciate, 



THE UNCLOUDED HEART. 



377 



he becomes insensible; and a bitter poison drops into 
the fountains of his most generous peace. There is 
no more melancholy sight, than that of a mind, other- 
wise great, succumbing beneath a mean and fretful 
passion like this ; indulging in petty cavils at worth, 
before which he should lead on the multitude to bend 
the knee; so visibly greedy of other's praise, that the 
most vulgar observer laughs to think that the great 
man is just like himself. It was a grief, like an abso- 
lute bereavement, to find that our own Newton, who 
should have lifted a brow as pure and smooth as the 
heavens he interpreted, and have greeted all that 
was good beneath them with a smile of god-like 
benediction, could tease a brother laborer, like Flam- 
stead, and shrivel up his temper into peevishness, 
and be driven hither and thither by trivial suspicions, 
like a blind giant led about by a little child. Let us 
hope, what indeed there is some reason to believe, that 
all this was rather tremulousness of shattered nerves, 
than the perturbations of the native mind. Yet is it 
sad to have even to make excuse for such as he. 

Our judgments of human character and relations 
will not be right, unless our sympathies be not dis- 
interested only, but pure. The moral feelings must 
transcend the social ; the sense of duty be stronger 
than the instincts of affection. In addition to the 
negative qualification of not seeking our own will, 
we must have the positive one of seeking the will of 
the Father who is in heaven. The partialities of the 
affections are nobler every way than those of self- 
love; but they are partialities still; and while they 
make our judgments merciful, may prevent their be- 
ing just. They may bewilder our moral perceptions, 
and in pure tenderness for the guilty, seduce us to 
23* 



378 



THE UNCLOUDED HEART. 



think lightly of the guilt. There are in life few- 
temptations so severe as those which our human 
love may thus offer to our conscience. If, for ex- 
ample, children around a mother's knee betray their 
first unanswerable suspicion of their father's vices, 
and urge her w T ith wondering questions wmich she 
has so long dreaded to hear, that press hard upon his 
guilt ; what is she to do ? Is she to hide the anguish 
that trembles on her features, and, in fidelity to him, 
be for the first time untrue to them ? Is she to say 
the evil thing of him for whom she lives, and make 
him as a byword and a warning to his children's 
lips ? And yet, is she to take it on herself to soil the 
purity and simplicity of their moral perceptions, and 
blow, with the foul breath of falsehood, on the lamp 
of God within their hearts ? Her first duty is, doubt- 
less, to the sanctities of their young minds ; but so 
hard a lot forces us to think, how dreadful is the 
guilt that makes a contradiction between the sym- 
pathies of virtue and of home, and turns into a sin 
the natural mercy of disinterested love. 

Whatever, then, be the office required of the judg- 
ment; whether to seek truth along difficult ways, or, 
amid the sophistries of custom, to interpret our own 
responsibilities ; whether it is invited to the generous 
appreciation of excellence, or summoned to the stern 
duties of disapprobation and rebuke; he only who 
can abandon his own will, and seek that of the 
Father in heaven, will either discern his position 
clearly, or discharge its obligations with simplicity 
and courage. Nor will this clearness of view and 
directness of aim be likely to desert him in the greater 
emergencies of life. Then it is that meaner principles 
of action, all mere personal desires, collapse in weak- 



THE UNCLOUDED HEART. 



379 



ness and bewilderment. In times of danger, where 
it is needful to risk something or lose everything, 
men, possessed of no higher inspiration, lose their 
presence of mind; and while they stand in timid 
calculation, the one only moment of faithful duty 
slips away. They will profess perhaps to have been 
overpowered by the sense of their responsibility; — 
an unconscious acknowledgment of the confusion 
into which all self-regarding feelings throw the mind; 
for no man truly earnest about an object, critically 
pauses or turns aside to examine how he is acquit- 
ting himself. No ! great as are the achievements of 
inferior principles of action, — the love of power, the 
pursuit of glory, — the only heroism, fitted for the 
last extremity of circumstance, is that of disinterested 
Duty. Others may skilfully and firmly use up their 
outward resources to the last; but the Christian hero, 
when all these are gone, has yet to spend himself, 



XXX. 



'HELP THOU MINE UNBELIEF.' 

Mark ix. 24. 
lord, i believe | help thou mine unbelief. 

That this is an age most sensitive as to its belief, 
is evident on the slightest inspection of its moral phy- 
siognomy. A profound curiosity is awakened re- 
specting the foundations of faith, and the proper 
treatment of those high problems which religion un- 
dertakes to solve. An unexampled proportion of our 
new literature is theological ; of our new buildings, 
ecclesiastical; of our current conversation, on the 
condition and prospects of sects. The social move- 
ments which are watched with the most anxiety on 
the one hand, and hope on the other, are recent 
organizations of religious sympathy and opinion. 
Even the interests of industry and commerce find, 
for the moment, rival attractions to dispute their 
omnipotence; and the church is almost a balance for 
the exchange. A converted clergyman is as interest- 
ing as an apostate statesman ; a visit to Rome, as a 
mission to Washington ; a heresy from Germany, as 
a protocol from Paris ; and a new baptism is no less 
the theme of talk than a new tariff. If theological 
gossip were the measure of religious faith we should 
be the devoutest of all human generations. 



HELP THOU MINE UNBELIEF. 



381 



Yet with all this currency of holy words, rarely I 
believe has there been a scantier exchange of holy 
thought. We do not meet, eye to eye, and heart to 
heart, and say, with bosomed breath, ' Lo, God is 
here ! ' But, rather, with quick observant glance, 
and loud harsh voice, we notice the posture of others, 
and discuss the things they say ; and go round like a 
patrol to look in upon the world at prayers. The 
talk is all critical, about the length or shortness of 
some one's creed, the warmth or coldness of a peo- 
ple's worship. It tells you what each church thinks 
of all its neighbors, and repeats to you the image of 
Christendom in every phase. But flitting from image 
to image, we nowhere light upon the reality. We 
stand in one another's presence, like so many mir- 
rors ranged around empty space ; turning to each, 
you see only a distorted grouping of all the rest; 
which being gone, it would be evident at once, that 
that polished face could show merely vacancy with- 
out a trace of God. Of old, when lived the saints 
and prophets whose names we take in vain, the 
language of religion was itself the very incense that 
rose from burning, fragrant souls to heaven ; now, it 
does but analyze the smoke, and explain of what 
chemistry it comes. Christ ' came to bring fire upon 
earth,' and his disciples, after eighteen centuries, are 
discussing the best patent match to get it kindled! 

There is one feature in the professions of the pre- 
sent times, as compared with past, on which it is im- 
possible to reflect without astonishment. There is 
everywhere the sharpest discernment of unbelief in 
others, with an entire freedom from it in one's self. 
The critic, if you will only go round with him, can 
show you' how it is lurking here and there. He 



382 



HELP THOU MINE UNBELIEF. 



keeps a list of all that his neighbors do not believe. 
Through the powerful glass of his suspicions he can 
make you aware of the nicest shades of heresy ; and 
from writers who open new veins of thought, can 
pick out passages so dreadful as to constitute a kind 
of infidel anthology. From whatever class you 
choose your guide, this is what he will point out to 
you. Yet if you turn round and say, ' And now, good 
friend, what of thine own faith?' you will be delight- 
ed to find that it has altogether escaped the universal 
malady ; it has never had a shake ; or, if ever ailing, 
has long got up its good looks, and remains quite 
sound and firm. Trust, in short, the churches' report 
of one another, and godlessness is universal; tmst 
their account of themselves, and scepticism is extinct. 
Nobody hesitates about anything which it is respect- 
able to hold; and the clearest atmosphere of certainty 
overarches every life, and opens a heaven undarkened 
by a doubt. And who are these men, before whom 
the universe is so transparent; for whom the veil of 
mystery is all withdrawn, or at least hides no awful 
possibilities? who are always ready to say, 'Lord, 
I believe ! ' but would look askance at the brother 
who should meekly respond, ' Help thou mine un- 
belief! ' — Smooth, easy men, with broad acres in the 
country, or heavy tonnage on the sea; with good 
standing in their profession, or good custom at their 
shop ; living a life so rounded with comfort, and 
showing a mind so content to repose on it, that, 
while rents and freights keep up, you cannot fancy 
they would much feel the loss of God ; and to part 
with the reversion of heaven would hardly affect 
them like the news of a large bad debt. They be- 
lieve soundly, in the same way that they dress neat- 



HELP THOU MINE UNBELIEF. 



383 



ly; it no more occurs to them to question their 
habitual creed, than to think in the morning whether 
they shall put on a toga or a coat; it is a matter of 
course, that the proprieties be observed, and things 
that are settled for us be left untouched. Besides, 
what could be done with the 4 common people,' if it 
were not for God ? 

Now from this easy faith, sitting so light upon our 
modern men, I turn to the old Puritan, and am 
startled by the contrast. However much you may 
dislike his uncouth looks, and be offended with his 
whining voice, he is not a man without religion; — a 
pity, it may be, that he has taken the holiness and 
left the beauty of it. Missing it however in his person 
and in his speech, you find it penetrating his life, and 
shaping it to high ends of truth and right. He can 
act and suffer for God's sake ; can stand loose from 
the delusions of property, — say that nothing is his 
own, — and occupy his place as a fiduciary fief from 
the Lord Paramount of all; can despise gaudy ini- 
quity, and see to the heart of every gilded flattery ; — 
can insist on veracity in the council, and simplicity 
in the church; — feel the Omniscient eye on his 
state paper as he writes; and the Eternal Spirit 
directing the course his persecuted step shall take. 
Yet look into this man's diary, and stand by and 
overhear his prayers. He loudly bewails his unbelief; 
— confesses a heart chilled with the very shadow of 
death; — complains that the Most High has hid his 
face from him; and with tears and protestations calls 
on the spirit of Christ to exorcise the demons of 
doubt that are grappling with his soul. Surely this 
is a strange thing. Here is a man plainly living for 
sublime ends, beyond the baubles of this world; a 



384 



HELP THOU MINE UNBELIEF. 



man who has got fear and pain beneath his feet; who 
welcomes self-denial, as an angel of the way, and 
watches every indulgence as a traitor offering the 
kiss; — to whom the purest human love appears a 
snare tempting him to linger here ; — who walks the 
earth, as in the outer fringe of the beatific vision ; 
and his cry is, ' Help thou mine unbelief! ' And here 
are we, strangers to wrestlings such as his; who sleep 
soundly by nights, and manage prosperously by day ; 
whose grand care is to get a living, rather than to live, 
and to cure by rule the health impaired by luxury; 
— we, to whom the earth answers well enough as a 
kitchen, a parlor, an office, or a theatre, but hardly as 
a watch-tower of contemplation, or a holy of holies 
for the oracles of God ; — we can stand up, and have 
the assurance to say, ' Lord! we believe! ' 

The difference between these two states of mind 
does not require that we should charge either of them 
with hypocrisy. There is truth in the professions of 
them both ; truth enough to vindicate their veracity, 
though not to equalize their worth. The unbeliever in 
the one case and the believer in the other, are meas- 
ured off from a different scale ; our fathers looking 
up to the faith they ought to gain, their children look- 
ing down to the faith they have yet to lose. The 
former had so lofty a standard, that every thought 
beneath the summit-level was reckoned to their 
shame ; the latter have so low a standard, that all 
above the dead level at the base of life is counted to 
their praise. Nor is this at all inconceivable, even 
though we were to reduce all religion to a single 
article of faith. To me, I confess, it seems a very 
considerable thing, just to believe in God ; — difficult 
indeed to avoid honestly, but not easy to accomplish 



HELP THOU MINE UNBELIEF. 385 

worthily, and impossible to compass perfectly ; — a 
thing not lightly to be professed, but rather humbly 
to be sought; not to be found at the end of any 
syllogism, but in the inmost fountains of purity and 
affection ; — not the sudden gift of intellect, but to be 
earned by a loving and brave life. It is indeed the 
greatest thing allowed to mankind, — the germ of 
every lesser greatness ; and he who can say, 4 1 have 
faith in the Almighty,' makes a higher boast than if 
he could declare, ' the Mediterranean is my garden, 
and mine is every branch that waves upon its shores, 
from the cedars of Lebanon to the pine upon the 
Alps.' How often in the stifling heat and press of life, 
when trivial cares rise with dry and dusty cloud to shut 
us in, do we wholly lose our place in the great calm 
of God, and fret as if there were no Infinite Reason 
embracing the vortex of the world! In loneliness 
and exhaustion, when the spirits are weak, and the 
crush of circumstance is strong ; — when comrades 
rest and sleep, we must toil and watch ; — when the 
love of friends grows cold, and the warm light of 
youth is quenched, and the promises of years seem 
broken, and hope has but one chapter more ; — how 
little do we think, as the boughs drip sadly with all 
this night rain, that we lodge in Eden still, where the 
voice of the Lord God rustles in the trees, and be- 
speaks the blossom and the fruit that can only spring 
from tears ! Fear, too, in every form except the fear 
of sin, is a genuine Atheism. The very child knows 
that ; for if a terror comes on him because he is in 
the field alone by night, he chides himself for his 
false heart ; stops and looks tranquilly around ; re- 
laxes the rigid limbs, and lets go the stifled breath ; 
putting forth a thought into the Great Presence, and 
33 



386 



HELP THOU MINE UNBELIEF. 



drawing a holy quiet from the stars. And through all 
manhood's fears, no one loses his presence of mind, 
who has not lost the presence of his God. In the 
battle-field, where Justice sometimes makes appeal to 
the Lord of Hosts ; in the shipwreck," where death 
seizes the storm as his trumpet, and with the light- 
ning as his banner, comes streaming down the sky ; 
in courts of sacerdotal Inquisition, where the brand- 
ing-iron is hot, and instruments of torture tempt the 
lie ; in the careless world, where prosperity is wor- 
shipped, and nice scruples are laughed down ; in the 
sleepy church, which can wink at oppression, and 
give comfort to unrighteous Mammon, and cover 
with obloquy the heroes of God's truth; — no man 
could sink into an unworthy thing, did he keep with- 
in his everlasting fortress, instead of rushing unshel- 
tered into the wild. 

There is then every gradation even of this simple 
faith, spreading over a range quite indefinite. Only 
by a reference to its two extremes can we describe 
the position of each mind and of each age. Com- 
plete belief is attained, when God is realized as much 
in the present as in the past. Complete unbelief 
when God is excluded from the past as much as 
from the present. Measuring from this lowest limit, 
we are certainly in a state of imperfect Atheism. We 
do not negative as yet the sanctities of old ; we only 
deny the inspirations of to-day. We receive certain 
ages of the bygone world, as the real centres of Divine 
activity, — the sole witnesses of creation and of mira- 
cles, the happy points where Heaven vouchsafed to 
commune with earth. They lie in our imagination, 
like brilliant islands rising distant in the seas of Time ; 
vainly dashed by the dark waters of human history ; 



HELP THOU MINE UNBELIEF. 



387 



and lighted by a glory-column from above, piercing 
the leaden heavens that elsewhere overhang the 
waste. There in old Palestine, A\e think, the august 
voice broke for a moment its eternal silence. There, 
upon the mountains, was a murmur more than of the 
wind; and in the air a thunder grown articulate ; and 
on the grass a dew of fresher beauty ; and in the lakes 
a docile listening look, as if conscious of a Presence 
higher than the night's. In this retrospect, it will not 
be denied, lies the ground of our prevalent religion ; 
it contains the strength of our case ; our assurance of 
divine things refers pre-eminently thither, and scarcely 
at all to any more recent age. 6 The men in those 
days ' (we virtually say) < had the best reasons for 
believing and recognizing God. Had we too been 
there, we should have known for ourselves, and have 
shared the great fear and faith that fell on all. But 
as we are placed afar off and have the sacredness at 
second hand, we must take their reasons upon trust, 
having none that are worth much of our own.' Our 
faith, therefore, is not personal, but testimonial ; it is 
an hypothesis, a tradition. It thinks within itself, 1 if 
we had stood where Moses was, and travelled at the 
right hand of Paul, we should have felt as they.' 
And this justification of their ancient state of mind 
makes the substance of our belief to-day. And with 
like view do we turn our gaze upon the future. That 
also spreads before us radiant with a light divine. 
There we shall find better reasons for our faith than 
meet us here ; an audience-hall of the Most High 
where his spirit may be felt ; a clear touch of his 
living presence, glowing through our thought with 
conscious truth, and spreading through our hearts a 
saintly love, denied us in this court of exile. And so 



388 



HELP THOU MINE UNBELIEF. 



it happens, that ages gone, and ages coming, absorb 
from us the whole reality of God, and leave the life 
on which we stand an atheistic death. The heaven 
that spans us touches the earth on the right hand and 
the left, at an horizon we cannot reach, but keeps its 
infinite zenith-distance over head. We believe in 
One who looks at us, but not in One who lives with 
us. We are in the house he built ; but we work in 
it alone, for he has gone up among the hills, and will 
only come to fetch us by-and-by. And it is no won- 
der, that in a banishment like this, our worship loses 
its immediate reality, and prays no more with a 
strong heart. It is not bathed in the flowing tides of 
Deity, but keeps dry on the strand from which he has 
ebbed away. If ever it says ' Lo ! God is here ! ' it 
instantly belies itself, by drawing out the telescope of 
history to look for him. It is not a communion face 
to face, wherein he is near to us as the light upon our 
eye or the sorrow on our hearts. It has become a 
Commemoration, telling what once he was to happier 
spirits of our race, and how grateful we are for the 
dear old messages that faintly reach our ear, how we 
will cherish the last remnant of that precious and 
only sure memorial, — the fragile and consecrated 
link between his sphere and ours. Thus our worship 
is a monument of absent realities, and serves at best 
but to keep alive, like an anniversary, the remem- 
brance of things else fading in the distance. Or else, 
if we direct our face the other way, and look towards 
the future, we throw our prayers still further from the 
actual duties at our feet. We plainly say there can 
be no true worship here, — it is too poor and dull a 
state ; — we only expect it hereafter, and would bear 
that greater prospect in our mind. And so we fall 



HELP THOU MINE UNBELIEF. 



389 



into the insincerity, of coming before God by way of 
keeping ourselves in practice, and turning our religion 
into a Rehearsal. What wonder that, amid these 
histrionic affectations, the healthy heart of faith gets 
sicklier till it dies. 

To approach again to the theocratic faith of our 
fathers, we must leave the atmosphere of sacredness 
upon the past and the future ; only spread its margin 
either way, till it envelopes and glorifies the present. 
For my own part, I venerate not less than others the 
birth- hour of Christianity, and the creative origin of 
worlds. But I do not believe that God lived then 
and there alone ; or that if we could be transplanted 
to those times, we should find any such difference as 
would melt down the coldness of our hearts, or leave 
us more without excuse than we are now. There is 
no chronology in the evidence, any more than in the 
presence, of Deity. Since the fathers fell asleep, all 
things continue as they were from the beginning, — 
or rather the ^beginning, — of creation. The uni- 
verse, open to the eye to-day, looks as it did a thou- 
sand years ago ; and the morning hymn of Milton 
does but tell the beauty with which our own familiar 
sun dressed the earliest fields and gardens of the 
world. We see what all our fathers saw. And if we 
cannot find God in your house and mine, upon the 
roadside or the margin of the sea; in the bursting 
seed or opening flower; in the day-duty and the 
night musing ; in the genial laugh, and the secret 
grief; in the procession of life, ever entering afresh, 
and solemnly passing by and dropping off; I do not 
think we should discern him any more on the grass 
of Eden, or beneath the moonlight of Gethsemane. 
Depend upon it, it is not the want of greater miracles, 

33* 



390 HELP THOU MINE UNBELIEF. 

but of the soul to perceive such as are allowed us 
etill that makes us push all the sanctities into the 
far spaces we cannot reach. The devout feel that 
wherever God's hand is, there is miracle; and it 
is simply an indevoutness which imagines that only 
where miracle is, can there be the real hand of God. 
The customs of Heaven ought surely to be more 
sacred in our eyes than its anomalies ; the dear old 
ways, of which the Most High is never tired, than 
the strange things which he does not love well 
enough ever to repeat. And he who will but discern 
beneath the sun, as he rises any morning, the sup- 
porting finger of the Almighty, may recover the sweet 
and reverent surprise with which Adam gazed on the 
first dawn in Paradise. It is no outward change, no 
shifting in time or place ; but only the loving medita- 
tion of the pure in heart, that can re-awaken the 
Eternal from the sleep within our souls ; that can 
render him a reality again, and re-assert for him once 
more his ancient Name of ' The Living God.' 



» 



XXXI. 

HAVING, DOING, AND BEING. 
1 John ii. 17. 

the world passeth away and the lust thereof : but he that 
doeth the will of god abideth for eyer. 

Few things can strike a thoughtful man with 
greater wonder, than the different estimate he makes, 
in different moods, of the same portion of time. 
To-day, he is engaged with some speculation, in 
which a millennium is not worth reckoning; to- 
morrow, he is brought to some experience, in which a 
minute bears the burden of an eternal weight. With 
the geologist we may go out beyond the limits of 
human events and grow familiar with those vast 
periods during which the earth's crust was deposited 
in the oceans, or smelted in the furnaces, or upheaved 
from the gas caverns, of nature ; and accustomed to 
call the Alps and Andes recent elevations, and to 
treat all living species as only the newest fashion of 
creative skill, we may well feel as though the hasty 
sands of our particular generation were lost, and God 
could have no index small enough to count our indi- 
vidual life. "With the astronomer, we may take a sta- 
tion external to this earth itself, recede to an era when 
possibly the solar system was but one of creation's 
morning mists, and trace its history as it first spun 



392 



HAVING, DOING, AND BEING. 



itself into orbital rings, and then rolled itself up into 
planetary globes ; and with an imagination occupied 
by cycles so capacious, for which the old granite 
pillars of the world can scarce, with utmost stretch 
of age, afford a unit-measure, it is not strange if we 
deem ourselves trivial as the insect, and transient as 
the flake of summer snow. Whoever approaches the 
human lot from this side of thought, descending upon 
it from the maxima, instead of ascending from the 
minima of calculable things, will be apt to think it a 
poor affair, and to regard it as a dream really com- 
pressed into a moment, but with a delusive conscious- 
ness of years. Seeing at night how calm and silent 
are the stars far greater than ours, sending down 
the same cold sharp light as they did on the first 
traveller lost upon the mountains or sinking in the 
sea, he may naturally look with a smile or a sigh at 
the ferment of human passion and pursuit, and gaze 
on it as on the dust-cloud of a distant army marching 
to immediate death. 1 What,' he might say, ' are the 
achievements of your mightiest force, and the last 
triumphs of your boasted civilization ? What do you 
effect by the vaunted efforts of your locomotive skill? 
Only certain glidings, which, a short way off, are but 
invisible changes of place on the surface of a bead. 
And what is the end of all your successive systems 
of health and disease ? — what the utmost hope of 
the skill of all physicians, and the cries and prayers 
from the whole infirmary of human ills ? Only this, 
— that a little respite may be given, till the rising 
pendulum shall have reached its fall. Nay, what is 
the aim even of your nobler institutions, devoted to 
the mind? On what do your ancient schools and 
universities, with generation after generation of 



HAVING, DOING, AND BEING. 



393 



students, spend themselves amid the murmurs of 
polite applause ? On the attempt to recover a few 
snatches from the sayings and doings of spirits that, 
like yourselves, had to vanish at cock-crowing. And 
all the while as you pant and strive and hope, the 
great immovable God is with you close at hand, 
and could tell you all by a whisper, if he would ! ' 

It is quite possible, in this way, by bringing the 
human career into comparison with the stupendous 
cycles that lie around jit, to dwarf its magnitude, and 
throw contempt upon its purposes. The prevailing 
tendency, however, is all in the opposite direction. 
The thoughts which science presents may operate as 
a telescope to show us what else there is beside our- 
selves, and persuade us that we are but as the trem- 
bling leaf in the boundless forests of existence. But 
those which are offered by affection and natural 
experience are rather apt to interpose a microscopic 
medium ; and instead of diminishing by comparison 
the whole of life, to magnify every part by concentra- 
tion. If that life, as you affirm, be but a short visit 
to this sphere, it is yet our only visit ; and the mo- 
ments of our stay acquire an intenser worth. If it 
has just begun, and is also on the verge of close, 
then we must revere it doubly, as a fresh thing, and 
as a thing about to perish; two sanctities comprise it 
all, — a first day and a last; and there is no time for 
custom to dull the space between the welcome and 
the adieu. Nor, after all, is any conscious life pro- 
per to be compared with the huge periods of the 
inanimate world. Their giant strides may roughly 
step from century to century, and have less in them 
than its quivering undulations over the smallest sur- 
face of time. The two things are absolutely incom- 



394 



HAYING, DOING, AND BEING. 



mensurable; and there is no chronometer that can 
reckon both. In moments of deep sorrow, or high 
faith ; when we either fear the last extremity, or hope 
for the dawn of new deliverance ; when we are sink- 
ing to the point of lowest depression, struggling on 
the wing of highest resolution; in startling agonies 
of duty that goad our jaded strength; in helpless 
vigils, when we must sit with folded hands and wait; 
in all crises of duty, of misery, of joy, of aspiration; 
— how little can the beat of . any clock count the 
elements of our existence then! The moments are 
stretched into an awful fulness; and while the mid- 
night star strikes the meridian wire, we pass through 
more than common years. Hence it is, that no 
familiarity with physical periods can induce us to 
think lightly of the contents of life. If God, affluent 
in eternities, is lavish of time upon his universe, he is 
economic of it with us; filling it with unutterable 
experiences, and charging it with irrevocable oppor- 
tunities. With so small an allowance of it here, 
every part of it may well appear a priceless treasure. 
And though too often we grow careless of the por- 
tion which we have, we complain if there is any 
that we seem to lose. We throw away whole 
handsful of time in heedless waste, and suffer no 
compunction ; but if God, with heavenly Will, take 
from us any expected hours, we burst into faithless 
tears. The term assured to us, we think, has been 
cut short; and the promised value cruelly withheld. 

The truth is, that neither of these views, — that 
which looks with philosophic slight on the whole of 
mortal life, and that which clings with human fond- 
ness to every part, especially if it be denied, — can 
stand the light of devout and Christian thought. On 



HAVING, DOING, AND BEING. 



395 



the one hand, that cannot be insignificant which God 
has deemed it worth while to call out to eternity, and 
set upon a theatre like this, fresh with duty ever new, 
and old with memories ever sacred; rich as Paradise 
with wonder and beauty, only covered now through 
sorrow with a conscious heaven. And that which 
God himself has brought hitherto look for awhile 
through real living eyes of thought and love, trans- 
parent to the answering gaze, can scarce, if we reflect 
on the difference between its presence and its ab- 
sence, be of less than infinite value. Yet on the other 
hand, it were wrong to measure its worth to us by 
the mere duration of its stay. It would be a far 
inferior treasure, were it calculable thus; and we can 
say nothing so depreciatory of a human life, as that 
we have lost half its value, because it was not twice 
as long. If this be so, the function it performs for us 
must be of the lowest order; not to our love, and 
faith, and aspiration, which, once awakened, can be 
doubled by no addition and consumed by no subtrac- 
tion of moments; but to our pleasure or our gains, to 
which alone this arithmetic of quantity can be appli- 
ed. To treat a life so incomplete, is to say that its 
proper end is unfulfilled ; is to assume that a certain 
amount of time was needful to realize that end; and 
that for want of such an amount, the existence 
granted becomes an aimless fragment. Some lives 
do, no doubt, present so poor an aspect, that only by 
an effort of strong faith can we refrain from thinking 
thus; but else, it is of the mere meanness and penury 
of our own spirits, that we lapse into so unworthy a 
complaint. If we look for a few moments into the 
different ends to which men live, we shall soon see, 
which of them are measurable by quantity, and pro- 
portioned to the time spent in their attainment. 



396 



HAVING, DOING, AND BEING. 



Some men are eminent for what they possess; 
some, for what they achieve; others, for what they 
are. Having, Doing, and Being, constitute the three 
great distinctions of mankind, and the three great 
functions of their life. And though they are neces- 
sarily all blended, more or less, in each individual, it 
is seldom difficult to say, which of them is prominent 
in the impression left upon us by our fellow man. 

In every society, and especially in a country like 
our own, there are those who derive their chief char- 
acteristic from what they have; who are always 
spoken of in terms of revenue; and of whom you 
would not be likely to think much, but for the large 
account that stands on the world's ledger in their 
name. In themselves, detached from their favorite 
sphere, you would notice nothing wise or winning. 
At home, possibly, a dry and withered heart ; among 
associates a selfish and mistrustful talk; in the coun- 
cil, a style of low ignoble sentiments; at church, a 
formal, perhaps an irreverent, dulness; betray a bar- 
ren nature, and offer you only points of repulsion, so 
far as humanities are concerned ; and you are amazed 
to think that you are looking on the idols of the ex- 
change. Their greatness comes out in the affairs of 
bargain and sale, to which their faculties seem fairly 
apprenticed for life. If they speak of the past, it is 
in memory of its losses and its gains; if of the future, 
it is to anticipate its incomings and investments. 
The whole chronology of their life is divided accord- 
ing to the stages of their fortunes, and the progress 
of their dignities. Their children are interesting to 
them principally as their heirs; and the making of 
their will fulfils their main conception of being ready 
for their death. And so completely do they paint 



HAYING, DOING, AND BEING. 397 

the grand idea of their life on the imagination of all 
who know them, that when they die, the Mammon- 
image cannot be removed, and it is the fate of the 
money, not of the man, of which we are most apt 
to think. Having put vast prizes in the funds, but 
only unprofitable blanks in the admiration and the 
hearts of us, they leave behind nothing but their 
property; or, as it is expressively termed, their ' effects] 
— the thing which they caused, the main result of 
their having been alive. How plain is it that we 
regard them merely as instruments of acquisition; 
centres of attraction for the drifting of capital; that 
they are important only as indications of commodi- 
ties; and that their human personality hangs as a 
mere label upon a mass of treasure! Every one must 
have met with a few instances in which this char- 
acter is realized, and with many in which, notwith- 
standing the relief of some redeeming and delightful 
features, it is at least approached. In proportion as 
this aim, of possession, is taken to be paramount in 
life, length of days must, no doubt, be deemed indis- 
pensable to the human destination. The longer a 
man lies out at interest, the greater must be the ac- 
cumulation. If he is unexpectedly recalled, every 
end which he suggested is disappointed; the only 
thing he seemed fit for cannot go on ; he is a power 
lost from this sphere, and incapacity thrust upon the 
other ; missed from the markets here, thrown away 
among sainted spirits there. For himself, and for 
both worlds, the event seems deplorable enough ; and 
it is difficult to make anything but confusion out of 
it. An imagination tacitly filled with this conception 
of life, as a stage prepared for enjoyment and pos- 
34 



398 



HAVING, DOING, AND BEING. 



session, must look on a term that is unfulfilled as on 
a broken tool, dropping in failure to the earth. 

Of those who have thus lived to accumulate and 
enjoy, History is fern the most part silent ; having in 
truth nothing to say. Not doing, the work, or joining 
in the worship of life, but only feasting at its table, 
they break up and drive off into oblivion as soon as 
the lights are out and the wine is spilt. Belonging en- 
tirely to the present, they never appear in the past; 
but sink with weight of wealth in the dark gulf; — 
unless perchance some Crcesus the Rich is fortunate 
enough to fall into association with Solon the Wise. 
There are no historical materials in simple animal 
existence, nor in the mere sentient being of a man, 
considered as the successful study of comfort, and 
receptacle of happiness. History is constructed by a 
second and nobler class, those who prove themselves 
to be here, not that they may have, but that they 
may do; to whom life is a glorious horn*; and who 
are so seen not to work that they may rest, but only 
-to rest that they may work. No sooner do they look 
around them with the open eye of reason and faith, 
upon the great field of the world, than they perceive 
that it must be for them a battle field; and they 
break up the tents of ease, and advance to the 
dangers of lonely enterprise and the conflict with 
splendid wrong. Strong in the persuasion that this 
is a God's world, and that his Will must rule it by 
royal right, they serve in the severe campaign of 
justice; asking only for the wages of life, and scorn- 
ing the prizes of spoil and praise. Wherever you 
find such, whether in the field, in the senate, or in 
private life, you see the genuine type of the heroic 
character, — the clear mind, the noble heart, indomit- 



HAVING, DOING, AND BEING. 



399 



able will, pledged all to some arduous and unselfish 
task; and whether it be the achievement, with Cob- 
den, of freedom of pacific commerce between land 
and land ; or, with Clarkson, of freedom of person be- 
tween man and man ; or, with Cromwell, of freedom 
of worship between earth and heaven; the essential 
feature is in all instances the same; the man holds 
himself as the mere instrument of some social work ; 
commits himself in full allegiance to it ; and spends 
himself wholly in it. They 'have a baptism to be 
baptized with ; and how are they straitened, till it be 
accomplished ! ' During the glorious conflict of such 
lives it is impossible not to look on with breathless in- 
terest. Once possessed of their great design, we watch 
its development with eager eye and beating heart. 
And if, early in the day, they are struck down, we 
clasp our hands in sudden anguish, and a cry goes 
up that the field is lost. And though this despair is 
a momentary loss of the true faith; though God 
never fails to rally the forces of every good cause 
that has mustered for battle on this earth; yet, no 
doubt, the victory in such a case is deferred; the 
plan is broken off ; the painful sense of a suspended 
work, that might have been finished, remains upon 
survivor's hearts. On behalf of the noble actors 
themselves, indeed, we have no embarrassment of 
faith ; there is that within them which may well find 
a home in more worlds than one, and meet a wel- 
come wherever Almighty justice reigns. We are not 
ashamed, as with the man of mere possession, to 
follow them into the higher transitions of their being, 
and knock for them at the gate of better spheres. 
But there appears something untimely and deplor- 
able in the providence of the world they quit. The 



400 



HAYING, DOING, AND BEING. 



fruit has not been permitted to ripen ere it dropped. 
The great function of their life required time for its 
fulfilment; and time has been denied. Their benefi- 
cent action was wholly through the energies of their 
living will ; and these energies are laid for us in un- 
seasonable sleep. And thus, while we are ashamed 
at the grave of the Epicurean, we weep over the de- 
parture of the hero. 

But there is a life higher than either of these. The 
saintly is beyond the heroic mind. To get good, is 
animal; to do good is human ; to be good is divine. 
The true use of a man's possessions is to help his 
work ; and the best end of all his work, is to show us 
what he is. The noblest workers of our world be- 
queath us nothing so great as the image of them- 
selves. Their task, be it ever so glorious, is historical 
and transient ; the majesty of their spirit is essential 
and eternal. When the external conditions which 
supplied the matter of their work have wholly de- 
cayed from the surface of the earth, and become ab- 
sorbed in its substance, the perennial root of their life 
remains, bearing a blossom ever fair, and a foliage 
ever green. And while to some, God gives it to show 
themselves through their work, to others he assigns it 
to show themselves without even the opportunity of 
work. He sends them transparent into this world ; 
and leaves us nothing to gather and infer. Good- 
ness, beauty, truth, acquired by others, are original to 
them ; hiding behind the eye, thinking on the brow, 
and making music in the voice. The angels ap- 
pointed to guard the issues of the pure life seem 
rather to have taken their station at its fountains, 
and to pour into it a sanctity at first. Such beings 
live simply to express themselves ; to stand between 



HAVING, DOING, AND BEING. 401 

heaven and earth, and meditate for our dull hearts. 
With fewer outward objects than others, or at least 
with a less limited practical mission devoting them to 
a fixed task, their life is a soliloquy of love and as- 
piration ; the soul not being with them, the servant 
of action, but action rather the needful articulation of 
the soul. Not, of course, that they are, in the slight- 
est degree, exempt from the stern and positive obliga- 
tions of duty, or license*d, any more than others, to 
dream existence away. If once they fall into this 
snare, and cease to work, the lineaments of beauty 
and goodness are exchanged for those of shame and 
grief. Usually they do not less, but rather more, than 
others ; only under somewhat sorrowful conditions, 
having spirits prepared for what is more than human, 
and being obliged to move within limits that are only 
human. The worth of such a life depends little 
on its quantity ; it is an affair of quality alone. These 
highest ends of existence have but slight relation to 
time. Years cannot mellow the love already ripe, or 
purify the perceptions already clear, or lift the as- 
piration that already enters heaven. It is with Christ- 
like minds, as it was with Christ himself. His divine 
work was not in the task that he did, but in the 
image which he left. You cannot say that there 
was any great business of existence, estimable by 
time, which he set himself to achieve ; and which 
you can even imagine to be broken off by his de- 
parture. He lived enough to manifest the heavenly 
spirit and solemn dignity of life. At thirty years he 
passed away ; and no one, I suppose, was ever heard 
to lament that he did not stay till sixty. He thought 
indeed as the faithful must ever think, that there was 
a ' work given him to do ; ' unaware that, by his very 
34* 



402 



HAVING, DOING, AND BEING. 



manner of devotion to it, it was already done. So 
eager was he worthily to finish it, that, of all his sor- 
rows, to be cut short in it was the bitterest cup that 
might not pass from him except he drank of it ; un- 
conscious that the spirit and the conquest of that 
agony did actually bring it to the sublimest close. 
His life stood in different relations to himself and to 
the world. To himself it was a solemn trust ; to 
the world, the truth and grace of God ; to him, it 
was given as the subject of achievement; to the 
world, as the object of new faith and love. And so 
the early cross, so dark to him, becomes the holiest 
vision of our hearts. It broke nothing abruptly off 
for us ; and enabled him to leave a Presence upon 
the earth, sufficient to soothe the sorrows, inspire the 
conscience, and deepen the earnestness, of succeed- 
ing ages. And so is it with the least of his disciples, 
whose mind is truly tinged with the hues of the same 
heavenly spirit. The very child, of too transient stay, 
may paint on the darkness of our sorrow, so fair a 
vision of loving wonder, of reverent trust, of deep and 
thoughtful patience, that a divine presence abides 
with us forever, as the mild and constant light of 
faith and hope. What we had deemed a glory of the 
earth, may prove but the image of a star upon a 
stream of life, effaceable by the first night-wind that 
sweeps over the waters. But that we have seen it, 
and looked into the pure depths given for its light, 
is enough to assure us that, though visionary below, it 
is a reality above, and has a place among the im- 
perishable lustres of God's universe. Thus, with at- 
tributes of being that have little concern with time, 
the reckoning of moments is of less account. The 
transitory reflection points to an eternal beauty. And 



HAVING, DOING, AND BEING. 



403 



while human things are learned by the lessons of a 
slow experience, a momentary flash of blessing may 
give us what is most divine ; and like the lightning 
that strikes us blind, leave a glory on the soul, when 
our very sight is gone. 



XXXII. 



THE FREE-MAN OF CHRIST. 

1 Corinthians vii. 22. 

he that is called in the lord, being a servant, is the lord's 
free-man ; likewise also, he that is called, being free, is 
Christ's servant. 

Freedom, in the most comprehensive sense of the 
word, can evidently belong to Omnipotence alone. 
To be exempt from all controlling force without, is 
the exclusive prerogative of a Being, within whose 
nature are folded all the active powers of the universe, 
and to whom there is no external Cause, but the acts 
projected from his own will To be at rest from all 
conflict within, can be the lot of no mind, susceptible 
of progressive attainment in excellence ; for moral 
growth is but a prolonged controversy in which con- 
science achieves victory after victory; and He only 
whose holiness is eternal, original, incapable of in- 
crease or decline, can have a mind absolutely serene 
and unclouded; of power immense, but rapid and 
unreluctant as the lightning ; of designs, however 
majestic, bursting without appreciable transition from 
the conception to the reality. Descend to created na- 
tures ; and whatever force they comprise is a force 
imprisoned and controlled ; if by nothing else, at least 
by the laws of that body, which gives them a locality, 
and affords them the only tools wherewith to work 



THE FREE-MAN OF CHRIST. 



405 



their will. The life of beings that are born and ripen 
and die, or pass through any stages of transition, floats 
upon a current silent but irresistible. In other spheres 
there may possibly exist rational beings unconscious 
of the restraining force of God exercised upon them ; 
whose desires do not beat against their destiny ; 
whose powers of conceiving and of executing, 
whether absolutely small or great, are adjusted to 
perfect correspondence. And since we measure all 
things by our own ideas, he whose conception never 
overlaps his execution, can never detect the poorness 
of his achievements, how trivial soever they may be 
in the eye of a spectator. But man, at all events, 
palpably feels his limits ; receives a thousand checks, 
that remind him of the foreign agencies to which he 
is subject ; glides like a steersman in the night over 
waters neither boundless nor noiseless, but broken by 
the roar of the rapid, and dizzy with the dim shapes 
of rocky perils. Our whole existence, all its energy 
of virtue and of passion, is, in truth, but the struggle 
of freewill against the chains that bind us ; — happy 
he, that by implicit submission to the law of duty es- 
capes the severity of every other ! Our nature is but a 
casket of impatient necessities ; urgencies of instinct, 
of affection, of reason, of faith ; the pressure of which 
against the inertia of the present determines the living 
movements, and sustains the permanent unrest of 
life. To take the prescribed steps is difficult ; to de- 
cline them and stand still is impossible. We can 
no more preserve a stationary attitude in the moral 
world, than we can refuse to accompany the physical 
earth in its rotation. The will may be reluctant 
to stir ; but it is speedily overtaken by provocatives 
that scorn the terms of ease, and take no heed of its 



406 



THE FREE-MAN OP CHRIST. 



expostulations. Driven by the recurring claims of the 
bodily nature, or drawn by the permanent objects of 
the spiritual, all men are impelled to effort by the 
energy of some want, that cannot have spontaneous 
satisfaction. The laborer that earns his bread by the 
sweat of his brow, is chased by the hindmost of all 
necessities, — animal hunger. The prophet and the 
saint, moved by the supreme of human aspirations, 
— the hunger and thirst after righteousness, — em- 
brace a life of no less privation and of severer con- 
flict. And between these extremes are other ends of 
various kinds, — renown for the ambitious, art for the 
perceptive, knowledge for the sage, — given to us to 
graduate in fair proportion. All these are conscious 
powers, but all imply a conscious resistance. Each 
separately precipitates the will upon a thousand 
obstacles ; and all together demand the ceaseless 
vigilance of conscience to preserve their order, and 
prevent the encroachments of usurpation. Thus, all 
action implies the presence of some necessity. And 
if other and more liberal conditons are requisite to 
perfect freedom, then can no man ever be free. 

Exemption then from the sense of want and the 
need of work, is not that which constitutes freedom 
to the human being. Another form of expression is 
sometimes resorted to, in order to discriminate the 
free from the servile mind,, and contrast the nobleness 
of the one with the abjectness of the other. It is 
said that the freemen acts from within, on the sug- 
gestion of ideas ; while the slave is the creature of 
outward coercion, and obeys some kind of physical 
force. But this language still conceals from us the 
real distinction. Even the man whose person, as 
well as mind, is in a condition -of slavery, is not 



THE FREE-MAN OF C HEIST. 



407 



necessarily, or usually, under any external and ma- 
terial constraint. Hour by hour, and day by day, he 
enjoys immunity from bodily compulsion; and ha- 
bitually lives at one remove from the application of 
direct sensation to his will. He too, like other men, 
is worked by an ideal influence, — a fear that haunts, 
an image that disturbs him. When the field-serf 
plies his spade with new energy at the approaching 
voice of the Steward, it is not that any muscular 
grasp seizes on his limbs and enforces a quicker 
movement; but that a mental terror is awakened, 
and the phantom of the lash flies through his startled 
fancy. And, in higher cases of obedience, it is pro- 
portionally more evident, that the physical objects 
which are the implements of procuring submission 
fulfil their end by the mere power of suggestion. 
The eagle of the Roman legion, the cross in the 
battles of the crusades, reared its head above the 
hosts upon the field; and wherever this instrument, 
made by the chisel and the saw, was moved about 
hither and thither, it drew to it the wave of fight and 
swayed the living mass, content to be mowed down 
themselves, if it alone were saved. It was an em- 
blem of things most powerful with their hearts; and 
illustrates by another example, the truth, that the 
force which persuades the submissive will is, in all 
instances, from the highest to the lowest, internal 
and ideal. The difference between the free and 
servile must be sought, not in the distinction between 
a physical and a mental impulse, but in the different 
order of ideas in which the action of the two has its 
source. 

There are two governing ideas that, without mate- 
rial error, may be said to rule the actions of mankind, 



408 



THE FREE-MAN OF CHRIST. 



and share between them the dominion of all human 
souls; the idea of pleasure and pain; and the idea of 
the noble and ignoble. Every one, in every deed, 
follows either what he enjoys or what he reveres. 
Now he, and he only, is free, who implicitly submits 
to that which he deeply venerates; who takes part, 
offensive and defensive, with the just and holy 
against the encroachments of evil; who feels his 
self-denials to be his privilege, not his loss; a vic- 
tory that he has won, not a spoil that he has been 
obliged to forego. Such a one is free, because he is 
ruled by no power which he feels to be unrightful 
and usurping, but maintains in ascendancy the divine 
Spirit that has an eternal title to the monarchy of 
all souls; because he is never driven to do that which 
he knows to be beneath him; because he is conscious 
no longer of severe internal conflict, or it issues in 
secure enfranchisement; because self-contempt, and 
fear and restlessness, and all the feelings peculiar to a 
state of thraldom, are entirely unknown. And they 
all are slaves, — liable to the peculiar sins and mise- 
ries of the servile state, — to its meanness, its cowar- 
dice, its treachery; — who either have nothing which 
they revere, or, having it, insults its authority, and 
trample it under the Bacchanalian feet of pleasure. 
It is the worst and last curse of actual personal 
slavery, that it extinguishes the notion of rights, and 
with it the sense of duties; that it quenches the 
desire and conscious capacity for better things ; that 
degradation becomes impossible; that blows may be 
inflicted, and the pain go no further than the flesh ; 
and that by feeding the eyes with the prospect of 
pleasure, or brandishing the threat of infliction, you 
may move the creature as you will. And whenever, 



THE FREE-MAN OF CHKIST. 



409 



by men at large, nothing is esteemed holy and excel- 
lent, and enjoyment or suffering are the only measures 
of good, the essence of the same debasement exists. 
The slave flies the idea of pain ; the voluptuary pur- 
sues the idea of pleasure ; a menace or a bribe is the 
force that makes a tool of both; and they must be 
referred to the same class. Nor does the analogy 
between them fail in cases of mixed character, and 
imperfect degradation. If the serf has not sunk to 
the level which it is the tendency of his condition to 
reach, if he has still his dreams of justice, his half- 
formed sense of human dignity, it is then his privi- 
lege to be wretched; to feel an agonizing variance 
between his nature and his lot, and writhe as the 
iron entereth his soul. And a like miserable shame 
does every one suffer, who offers indignity to his own 
higher capacities; who suppresses in silence and in- 
action the impulses of his devout affections, and is 
seduced or terrified into conscious vileness. It is not 
without sufficient reason that all those whose wills 
are of self-indulgence make, are charged with being 
enthralled. Their minds have the very stamp of 
slavery. 

The essential root then of all dependence and ser- 
vility of soul lies in this, that the mind loves pleasure 
more than God. The essence of true spiritual liberty 
is in this; that the mind has high objects which it 
loves better than its own indulgence; in the service 
of which hardship and death are honorable and wel- 
come; which must be subordinated to nothing; which 
men are not simply to pursue in order to live ; but 
which they live in order to pursue. In acknowledg- 
ing the pleasurable as supreme, consists the real 
degradation and disloyalty of the one; in vowing 
35 



410 



THE FREE-MAN OF CHRIST. 



undivided allegiance to what is worthy, true, and 
right, consists the power and freedom of the other. 

Let the Christian beware, as he loves the birth- 
right of a child of God, how he takes up any other 
and more superficial idea of moral liberty than this. 
Especially let him not yield to the prevalent and 
growing feeling of these days, that there is some- 
thing disgraceful in obedience altogether; — that it is 
an unmanly attitude of mind ; and that if occasions 
do occur in human life, when self-will must succumb, 
it is best to slur over so annoying a crisis, and at all 
events avoid the appearance of capitulation. The 
heart that secretly feels thus has never felt the con- 
tact of Christ's divine wisdom; the slightest touch of 
but the hem of his garment in the press and crowd 
of life, would have cured the burning of this inward 
fever. For, is not this insubordinate will fighting 
with its lot, instead of loving it, — trying bolts and 
bars against it, and standing hostile siege instead of 
throwing open its gates, and with reverent hospital- 
ity entertaining it as an angel visitant ? Great and 
sacred is obedience, my friends ; he who is not able, 
in the highest majesty of manhood, to obey, with 
clear and open brow a Law higher than himself, is 
barren of all faith and love ; and tightens his chains, 
moreover, in struggling to be free. A child-like trust 
of heart, that can take a hand and wondering walk 
in paths unknown and strange, is the prime requisite 
of all religion. Let the Great Shepherd lead; and by 
winding ways, not without green pastures and still 
waters we shall climb insensibly, and reach the tops 
of the everlasting hills, where the winds are cool and 
the sight is glorious. But, in the noon of life, to 
leap and struggle against the adamantine precipice 



THE FREE-MAN OP CHRIST. 



411 



will only bruise our strength, and cover us with sul- 
try dust. Among the thousand indications how far 
men have wandered from this temper, and poisoned 
their minds with the sophistries of self-will, this is 
enough ; that there are some who, instead of self- 
abandonment to God, appear to think that they can 
put him and his truth under obligation to themselves, 
and that they confer a great favor in encouraging the 
public regard to his will and worship ; who, having 
made up their minds that Christianity is useful in 
many ways, and of excellent service in managing the 
weaker portion of mankind, resolve to patronize it. 
Well ; — it is an ancient arrogance, lasting as the 
vanities of the human heart. The Pharisee, it would 
appear, belongs to a sect never extinct; he lives im- 
mortal upon the earth ; and in our day, like Simon of 
old, graciously condescends to ask the Lord Jesus to 
dine ! 

Nor is there any truth in the notion that it must 
be disgraceful to serve and obey the will of our fel- 
low-men; of our equals; of those even who are 
weaker and not wiser than ourselves. It depends 
altogether on the feeling that prompts the submis- 
sion, whether it be self-interest or reverence. To be 
controlled by them against our idea of the pleasant, 
is by no means necessarily debasing; to be controlled 
by them against our idea of the right, is. The gross 
conception of liberty, which takes it to consist in 
doing whatever we like, tends only to a restless per- 
sonal indulgence, — to a burning, insatiable thirst for 
selfish happiness, the importunity of which renders 
this fancied freedom bitter as the vilest slavery. 
Does any one doubt, whether subjection the most 
absolute can ever be noble ? Go into a home where 



412 



THE FREE-MAN OE CHRIST. 



a child lies sick, — one of a joyous family where often 
merry voices ring from morn to night. Silence, the 
unconscious forerunner of death, flits through the 
house, touching with her seal the lips even of the 
gayest prattler; and when the faint cry of feverish 
waking frets forth from the pillow, how fleet the 
answer to the call! how soft the mother's cheerful 
words from out the anguished heart! how prompt 
the father's hand with the cup of cold water to cool 
the parched tongue. Every wayward wish, perhaps 
discarded soon as formed, swift messengers glide to 
and fro to gratify; every burst of impatience falls 
softly and without recoil on playmates never wound- 
ed so before. No despot was ever so obeyed, as this 
little child, whose will is for awhile the sole domestic 
law; for despots acquire no such title to command. 
But this title recorded in God's handwriting of love 
on the tablets of our humanity, we must recognize 
and obey. The terms of it proclaim, in defiance of 
the pretensions of self-will, that the service of others 
is our divinest freedom; and that the law which rules 
us becomes the charter that disenthrals us. Nay, to 
work patiently in faith and love, to do not what we 
like, but what we revere, confers not liberty only but 
power. He at least who, of all our race, was the 
most indubitably free, and the great emancipator too, 
had in him this attribute, that ' he pleased not him- 
self, 7 and esteemed it his mission ' not to be minis- 
tered unto, but to minister.' And therefore did he 
obtain a name above every name, and put the 
world beneath his feet. Having claimed nothing, 
not even himself, it is given him to inherit all things. 
His power indeed over men was slow in gathering, 
and they that loved him in his mortal life, and lived 



THE FREE-MAN OF CHRIST. 



413 



and suffered for his sake, were few. Had he needed 
then a rescue and a retinue, he must have looked to 
the 'legions of Angels,' who alone were qualified for 
a reverence and fidelity so true. But now let him 
come; and would not the legions of our world throng 
forth to meet him ; casting the will of pride beneath 
his feet, strewing his path with flowers of joy which 
he has caused to bloom, and flinging their glad 
Hosannas to the sky ? 

By the meekest ministrations did the Lord acquire 
his blessed sway. How different is the method 
usually resorted to in order to obtain the services of 
others! Instead of thinking, speaking, acting freely, 
and in the divine spirit of duty, and leaving it to 
God to append what influence and authority he may 
see fit, men begin by coveting the services of others, 
and resolving to have them ; and, being sure that 
they can at least be purchased by money, they ' make 
haste to get rich;' often hurrying over every species 
of mean compliance for this purpose, in the wretched 
hope of earning their enfranchisement in the end. 
This process of making their moral liberty contingent 
upon the purse, is characteristically termed, '-gaining 
an independence? The very phrase is a satire upon 
the morals of the class that invented it, and the na- 
tion that adopts it. We then are a people, who ex- 
press by the same word, the freedom of the mind, the 
high rule of conscience and conviction, and a thing of 
gold, that can be kept at a bank, or invested in the 
funds. With us, broad acres must go before bold 
deeds; one must possess an estate before he can be a 
man. And so, to 'win an independence,' many an 
aspirant becomes a sycophant; to 'win an indepen- 
dence,' he licks the feet of every disgrace that can add 
85* 



414 



THE FREE-MAN OE CHRIST. 



a shiling to his fortune; to 'win an independence,' 
he courts the men whom he despises, and stoops to 
the pretences that he hates; to 'win an indepen- 
dence,' he solemnly professes that which he secretly 
derides, and grows glib in uttering falsehoods that 
should scald his lips. Truly this modern idol is a 
God, who compels his votaries to crawl up the steps 
of his throne. And when the homage has been paid, 
and the prize is gained, how noble a creature must 
the worshipper issue forth, who, by such discipline, 
has achieved his 'independence' at last! 

This miserable Heathenism is simply reversed in 
the Christian method and estimate of liberty. The 
road to genuine spiritual, freedom, taking, it may 
seem, a strange direction, lies through what the older 
moralists called ' Self-annihilation.' Renounce we 
our wishes, and the oppositions that bear against us 
inevitably vanish. As force is made evident only by 
resistance, necessity is perceptible only by the pres- 
sure it offers to our claims and desires. He who 
resists not at all, feels no hostile power; is chafed by 
no irritation; mortified by no disappointment. He 
bends to the storm as it sweeps by, and lifts a head 
serene when it is gone. Nor is his liberty merely 
negative; self-will is displaced only to make way for 
God's will; and weakness is surrendered that Al- 
mightiness may be enthroned. The positive empire 
of the right takes the place of a feeble and contested 
sway. The efficacy of the change is sure to be seen 
in achievement no less than in endurance. Over 
him that shall undergo it the world and men lose all 
their deterring power. Do what they may with their 
instruments of persecution and derision, none of these 
things move him. They cannot sting him into scorn. 



THE FREE-MAN OE CHRIST. 



415 



His ends lie far beyond their reach. Who can hinder 
him from following that which he reveres ; from em- 
bracing in his love the world that crushes him; and 
remaining true to the God that tries him as by fire? 
It is the Son that has made him free, and he is free 
indeed ! 



XXXIII. 



THE GOOD SOLDIER OF JESUS CHRIST. 
2 Timothy n. 3. 

THOTJ THEREFORE ENDURE HARDNESS, AS A GOOD SOLDIER OF JESUS 
CHRIST. 

There would seem to be an incurable variance 
between the life which men covet for themselves and 
that which they admire in others ; nay, between the 
lot which they would choose beforehand, and that in 
which they glory afterwards. In prospect, nothing 
appears so attractive as ease and licensed comfort; 
in retrospect, nothing so delightful as toil and strenu- 
ous service. Half the actions of mankind are for the 
diminution of labor; yet labor is the thing they most 
universally respect. We should think it the greatest 
gain to get rid of effort ; yet if we could cancel from 
the past those memorable men in whom it reached 
its utmost intensity, and whose whole existence was 
a struggle, we should leave human nature without a 
lustre, and empty history of its glory. The aim 
which God assigns to us as our highest, is indeed the 
direct reverse of that which we propose to ourselves. 
He would have us in perpetual conflict; — we crave 
an unbroken peace. He keeps us ever on the march; 
— we pace the green sod by the way with many a 
sigh for rest. He throws us on a rugged universe* — 



THE GOOD SOLDIER OP JESUS CHRIST. 417 

and our first care is to make it smooth. His resolve 
is to demand from us, without ceasing, a living 
power, a force fresh from the spirit he has given; 
ours, to get into such settled ways, that life may 
almost go of itself, with scarce the trouble of winding 
up. So that Time, administered by Him, is always 
breaking up the old; by us is rivetting and confirm- 
ing it. With him, it is the source of new growths 
and fresh combinations ; which we proceed, as long 
as we can, to cut down and accommodate to the 
order which they interrupt. He employs it in rolling 
the forest into the river, and turning the stream from 
our abodes; in burying our fields and villages be- 
neath the shifting sand-hills, which we strive to bind 
with grassy roots ; in bringing back the marsh on our 
neglected lands, and setting us again the problem 
of pestilence and want. Every way he urges our 
reluctant will. He grows the thistle and the sedge ; 
but expects us to raise the olive and the corn ; hav- 
ing given us a portion of strength and skill for such 
an end. He directs over the earth the shifting wave 
of human population, and brings about those new 
conditions from which spring the rivalries and heats 
of nations ; and expects us to evolve peace and 
justice ; having inspired us with reason and affection 
for this end. He leaves in each man's lot a thicket 
of sharp temptations; and expects him, though with 
bleeding feet, to pass firmly through; having given 
him courage, conscience, and a guide divine, to 
sustain him lest he faint. 

And, after all, in spite of the inertia of their will, 
men are, in their inmost hearts, on the side of God, 
rather than their own, in this matter. They know it 
would be a bad thing for them to have nothing to 



418 THE GOOD SOLDIER OF JESUS CHEIST. 

resist. They would like it, but they could not honor 
it ; and in proportion as it was comfortable, it would 
be contemptible. They have always paid their most 
willing homage to those who have refused to sit 
down and break bread with evil things, and have 
made a battle-field of life. Even out of the primi- 
tive conflict with brute Nature, in which rocks were 
split, and monsters tamed, they evoked a God ; and 
under the name of Hercules, invented an excuse 
for their first and simplest worship. No sooner is 
this physical contest closed, and the earth compelled 
to yield a roadway and a shelter to men, than the 
scene of struggle is changed, and they come into con- 
flict with each other. Instead of dead resistance 
they encounter living force ; from obstructive matter 
their competitor rises to aggressive mind ; and who- 
ever shows himself master of the higher qualities de- 
manded in the collision, for justice' sake, of man with 
man, — the fixed resolve, the dauntless courage, the 
subjection of appetite, the sympathy with the weak 
and the oppressed, — is honored by all as a hero, and 
remembered by his nation as its pride. But when 
the game of war is done, it is found that in struggling 
to a firm and established order of society, men have 
not got rid of all their foes and driven evil from off 
their world. Inward corruption may waste what out- 
ward assault could not destroy. Amid the luxuries 
and repose of peace, the springs of moral hardihood 
become enfeebled ; guilty negligence, indulgent laxity, 
plausible selfishness, and even greedy hypocrisy, eat 
into the world's heart. A secret spirit of temptation, 
too powerful for its degeneracy, hovers over it, and 
threatens to darken it into a Hell ; when lo ! at the 
crisis of its fate, there comes forth one to meet and 



THE GOOD SOLDIEJ& OF JESUS CHRIST. 419 



to defy even this Invisible Fiend of moral evil, and 
by the wonders of prayer and toil and sorrow, make 
Lucifer, as lightning fall from heaven ; — one, far dif- 
ferent from the Strong Arm that subdues creation, 
and the Brave Heart that conquers men ; being the 
Divine Soul that puts to flight the hosts of Satan, 
and as the leader and perfecter of Faith, pushes the 
victories of men into the only unconquered realm, — ■ 
the shadowy domain of Sin and its dread prisons of 
Remorse. Thus the primitive conflict with nature, 
which makes a Hercules, rises into the conflict with 
man, which makes the hero, and culminates in that 
infinitely higher conflict with the spirit of Evil which 
is impersonated in Christ. We instinctively do hom- 
age in some sort to them all ; only admiring the for- 
mer as manly ; and reverencing the last as god-like. 
And it may be remarked that, as the world has 
passed through these several stages of strife to pro- 
duce a Christendom ; so by relaxing in the enterprises 
it has learnt, does it tend downwards, through in- 
verted steps, to wildness and the waste again. Let 
a people give up their contest with moral evil ; dis- 
regard the injustice, the ignorance, the greediness, 
that may prevail among them, and part more and 
more with the Christian element of their civilization ; 
and, in declining this battle with Sin, they will 
nevitably get embroiled with men Threats of war 
and revolution punish their unfaithfulness ; and if 
then, instead of retracing their steps, they yield again 
and are driven before the storm ; — the very arts they 
had created, the structures they had raised, the usages 
they had established, are swept away ; * in that very 
day their thoughts perish.' The portion they had re- 
claimed from the young earth's ruggedness is lost ; 



420 THE GOOD SOLDIER OE JESUS CEEIST. 

and failing to stand fast against man, they finally 
get embroiled with Nature, and are thrust down be- 
neath her ever-living hand. 

The law of conflict which God thus terribly pro- 
claims in the history of nations, is no less distinctly 
legible in the moral life of individuals. In an old and 
complicated structure of society, the number is multi- 
plied of those who exist in a state of benumbed habit ; 
who walk through their years methodically, not find- 
ing it needful to be more than half awake ; who take 
their passage through human life in an easy chair, 
and no more think of any self-mortifying work than 
of the ancient pilgrimage on foot ; and are so pleased 
with the finish and varnish of the world around them, 
as to fancy demons and dangers all cleaned out, 
and thus the perfected customs, the smooth mac- 
adamized ways of life, which are all excellent as facili- 
ties for swifter activity, have the effect of putting 
activity to sleep ; the means of helping us to our 
proper ends, become the means of our wholly forget- 
ting them ; and looking out of the windows, we leave 
behind the commission on which we are sent, and set 
up as travellers for pleasure. This kind of peril is the 
peculiar temptation which besets all, and makes im- 
beciles of many, in an artificial community like ours. 
The battle of life is not now, so often as of old, thrust 
upon us from without : it does not give us the first 
blow, which it were poltroonery to fly ; but it is inter- 
nal and invisible ; it has to be sought and found by 
voluntary enterprise ; it is not with palpable flesh 
and blood beneath the sun, but with viewless spirits, 
that cling to us in the dark. To capture the appetites, 
and make them content with their proper servitude ; 
to change the heart of ambition, and turn its aspiring 



THE GOOD SOLDIER OF JESUS CHRIST. 421 

eye from the lamp of heathen glory to the starlight 
of a Christian sanctity ; to seize anger and yoke it 
under curb of reason to the service of justice and of 
right ; to lash the sluggish will to quicker and more 
earnest toil ; to charm the dull affections into sweeter 
and more lively moods, and tempt their timid shyness 
to break into song and mingle voices with the 
melody of life ; to rouse pity from its sleep, and com- 
pel it to choose a task and begin its plan ; — all this 
implies a vigilance, a devotion, an endurance, which, 
though only natural to the < good soldier of Jesus 
Christ,' are beyond the mark of the sceptics and 
triflers of the present age. 

I have said sceptics and triflers. And be assured 
the conjunction is true and natural The shrinking 
from difficulty, the dread of ridicule, the love of ease, 
which drain off the sap of a man's moral earnestness, 
soon dry up the sources of all moral faith from the 
very roots of him. Though in one sense it is true 
that he must believe before he acts, yet assuredly he 
will not long go on believing, when he has ceased to 
act. The coward who skulks from the fight mutters, 
as he retires, that ' there is really nothing worth fight- 
ing for.' And those who decline the high battle of 
the Christian life persuade themselves, that there 
is no worthy field, no peremptory call, no dreadful 
foe ; and the clarion of God which pierces and in- 
spires faithful souls is no more to them than the pipe 
of hypocrites. The plain of prophet's warfare, where 
every step should be circumspect, becomes in their 
eyes a soft and fruitful stroll; and the sins which 
good men have spent themselves in driving back, 
turn out to be the pleasantest companions, of whom 
it was quite a bigotry to think harm. Instances of 
36 



422 THE GOOD SOLDIER OE JESUS CHEIST. 

this kind of self-sophistication must have presented 
themselves to the observation of all. They plainly 
show, that any truth a man ceases to live by neces- 
sarily becomes to him, if he only persevere, an entire 
falsehood. God insists on having a concurrence be- 
tween our practice and our thought. If we proceed 
to make a contradiction between them, he forthwith 
begins to abolish it ; and if the Will does not rise to 
the Reason, the Reason must be degraded to the 
Will. This is no other than that ' giving over of 
men to a reprobate mind,' by which ' the truth of God 
is changed into a lie.' 

It is needless to point out the several devices by 
which practical unfaithfulness contrives to bring- 
about speculative unbelief. They are almost as 
various as the individual minds producing them ; and 
agree only in their result ; viz. the loss of all moral 
earnestness ; the decline of any feeling of reality 
about the higher ends of life ; the disclination to any- 
thing that interrupts the easy play of Self-love ; and 
the subsidence of the mighty wind of resolution 
which should sweep direct and steady through the 
true man's course, into fitful airs of affectation and 
puffs of caprice. It is not the failure of this or that 
doctrinal conviction, that we need in itself lament; of 
this sort we could part perhaps with a good deal of 
helpless trying to believe, without being at all the 
worse ; but it is the loosening of Moral Faith ; the 
fluctuating state of the boundary between right and 
wrong, or even the suspicion of its non-existence ; the 
absence from men's minds of anything worth living 
and dying for ; the lawyer-like impartiality, consisting 
of an indiscriminate advocacy, for hire or favor, of 
any cause irrespective of its goodness, — this it is 



THE GOOD SOLDIER OF JESUS CHRIST. 423 



that marks how we are drifting away from our proper 
anchorage. We seem to have reached an age of 
soft affections and emasculated conscience, full of 
pity for pain and disease, of horror at blood and 
death ; but doubting whether anything is wicked that 
is not cruel, and reconciling itself even to that on suf- 
ficient considerations of advantage. Does the com- 
plaint appear too strong and eager ? It is, however, 
solemn and deliberate ; for when I look back over a 
few years, I find there is no sort of personal liber- 
tinism, of domestic infidelity, of mercantile dishon- 
esty ; no breach of faith in States, no mean dishonor 
in officials, no shuffling expediency in public life ; no 
kindling of national malignity, no outrage of military 
atrocity, no extreme of theological Jesuitry ; which 
we have not heard excused by amiable laxity, and 
shrugged off into the dark ; or palliated in books en- 
joying disgraceful popularity ; or defended and ad- 
mired by statesmen who should elevate and not 
deprave a nation's mind. It is then too much to fear, 
that the new generation may grow up with be- 
wildered vision ; without the clear and single eye of 
conscience full of light ; and therefore without the 
resolute and hardy will of one who plainly sees what 
he is to avoid and what attain ? There is a remarka- 
ble intellectual subtlety engaged now-a-days in per- 
plexing men's moral convictions. On the one hand, 
there is the celebrated doctrine of happiness, in- 
geniously spun into a logical texture, to entangle 
those who are neither fine enough to pass through its 
meshes, nor strong enough to rend them ; — the doc- 
trine which assures you that enjoyment is the great 
end of existence, and is the only real element of 
worth in the objects of our choice. Of this I will say 



4'24 



THE GOOD SOLDIER OF JESUS CHRIST. 



no more at present, than that it plainly makes all 
duty a matter of taste, and reduces the distinction 
between evil and good to the difference between pills 
and peaches ; and that it puts an end to the spirit 
of moral combat of human life, and metamorphoses 
the ; good soldier of Jesus Christ ' into one knows 
not what strange sort of mock-heroic insincerity. At 
the feet of Epicurus a man must needs lay the Chris- 
tian armor down ; for one can hardly fancy the most 
logical of mortals tying on a breast-plate of faith, 
seeking the battle-field, and fighting — to be happy. 

But there is a more insidious doctrine than this, 
largely infused, from the philosophy of a neighboring 
country, into the literature of the age ; a doctrine 
not of the appetites, but of the imagination ; not the 
utilitarian but the aesthetic, contrary of the true faith 
of Duty. This would persuade us, that the moral 
Faculty is all very well as one of the elements of 
human nature : is highly respectable in its proper 
place among the rest, and could not be absent with- 
out leaving a grievous gap, interruptive of the sym- 
metry of the man : but that it must aspire to no 
more than this modest participation with its com- 
panions in the perfection of our being; that it must 
not presume to meddle with what does not belong 
to it, or refuse to make liberal concessions to the 
demands of beauty, expediency and self-love : and 
that it would be very narrow-minded, or, in fashion- 
able phrase, very one-sided, to try everything before 
the tribunal of this solitary power. Here also, only 
under more artful disguise, is a complete denial of 
all responsibility. Something, it is true, appears to 
be allowed to conscience ; a part is given it to play; 
and the point professedly disputed is not its existence 



THE GOOD SOLDIER OF JESUS CHRIST. 425 

with an appropriate function, but its exclusive pre- 
tensions and absolute authority. Unhappily, how- 
ever, when this much is discarded, it is only in 
semblance that anything remains. A moral faculty 
with a merely concurrent jurisdiction, or from whose 
decisions there is some appeal, is a palpable self- 
contradiction. As well might we propose to frame 
a government without any one highest. Conscience 
is authority, — divine authority, — universal author- 
ity ; or it is nothing. It is a right-royal power, that 
cannot stoop to serve ; dethrone it, and it dies. Not 
even can it consent to be acknowledged as a c citizen- 
king,' chosen by the suffrages of equals, open to their 
criticism, and removable at their pleasure. Either it 
must be owned as bearing a sacred and underived 
sovereignty, against which argument is impiety, and 
dreams of redress incur the penalties of treason ; or 
it will decline the earthly sceptre and retire to heaven. 
It reigns not by the acquiescent will of other powers, 
but is supreme by nature over all Will : nor rules 
according to any given law, being itself the fountain 
of all law, the guardian of order, the promulgator of 
right. Its prerogatives are penetrating and para- 
mount, like God. In the noble words of an old 
writer, ' Of (moral) Law there can be no less ac- 
knowledged, than that her seat is the bosom of 
God, her voice the harmony of the world : all things 
in heaven and earth do her homage, the very least as 
feeling her care, the greatest as not exempted from 
her power ; both angels and men, and creatures of 
what condition soever, though each in different sort 
and manner, yet all with uniform consent, admiring 
her as the mother of their peace and joy.'* 

* Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity : end of B. I. 

36* • 



426 THE GOOD SOLDIER OF JESTJS CHRIST. 

Let none then prevail with us to think, that there 
is any period of life, or any sphere of our activity, or 
any hour of our rest, which can escape the range of 
right and wrong, and be secluded from the eye of 
God. Not that we need grow stiff with the posture 
of unnatural vigilance, or assume the circumspection 
of a scrupulous and anxious mind ; that would only 
show that the formal and obedient will was yet hard 
and dry; that it was chiselled still into fitting shapes 
by the severe tool of care, instead of flowing down 
into the graceful moulds of a loving and trustful 
heart. The rule of a divine spirit over our whole 
nature is, in truth, of all things the most natural ; — 
natural as the blossom that crowns the tree, without 
which it would miss half its beauty, and all its fruit. 
Nothing can be more offensive to a good mind than 
the eagerness to claim, for some portions of our time, 
a kind of holiday-escape from the presence of duty 
and the consecration of pure affections ; to thrust off 
all noble thoughts and sacred influences into the 
most neglected corner of existence ; and drive away 
Religion, as if it were a haggard necromancer that 
must some time come, instead of a guardian-angel 
that must never go. It were shameful to sanction 
the low-minded sentiment which so often says of 
early life, that it is the time for enjoyment, and 
makes this an excuse for dispensing with everything 
else, and declining all demands upon the hardness of 
' the good soldier of Jesus Christ.' According to the 
canons of this wretched criticism, Life would have 
no secret unity ; it would be the sacred Epic, sung 
throughout by any constant inspiration ; but a mon- 
ster of incongruity; its first volume a jest-book; its 
second, a table of interest ; and its last, a mixture of 



THE GOOD SOLDIER OE JESUS CHRIST. 427 

the satire and the liturgy. For ray own part, I can 
form no more odious image of human life, than a 
youth of levity and pleasure, followed by a maturity 
and age of severity and pietism. Both sights, in this 
succession, are alike deplorable : a young soul with- 
out wonder, without reverence, without tenderness, 
without inspiration ; with superficial mirth, and deep 
indifference ; standing on the threshold of life's awful 
temple, with easy smile, without uncovered head, or 
bended knee, or breathless listening! Is that the 
time, do you say, for enjoyment? Yes; — and for 
enthusiasm, for conviction, for depth of affection, and 
devotedness of will; and if there be no tints of heaven 
in that morning haze of life, it will be vain to seek 
them in the staring light of the later noon. And 
therefore is that other sight most questionable, of 
religion becoming conspicuous first in mid-life, and 
presenting itself as the mere precipitate from the 
settling of the young blood. Every one may have 
noticed examples of men, long spending their best 
powers, the mellow heart, the supple thought, the 
agile will, in the service of themselves, — at length 
with the retreating juices of nature and sin, baked by 
the drying heats of life into the professing saint ; — 
like the rotting-tree, simply decaying into the gro- 
tesque semblance of something human or ghostly, 
which is no product of its proper vitality, and does 
but mimic other natures when the functions have 
departed from its own. Who can avoid looking on 
such cases with a somewhat suspicious eye? If in- 
deed the youth has been intrinsically noble, it is not 
for us to deny, that some under-current thence, after 
seeming lost in dark caverns of the earth, may re- 
appear to fertilize the meadows, and raise the sweet 



428 THE GOOD SOLDIER OF JESUS CHEIST. 



after-grass, of autumnal life. But it is not often that 
truth can allow the interpretation thus suggested by 
hope and charity. Usually the religion thus embraced 
is taken up, less because it is heartily believed and 
trusted, than because a distrust has arisen of every- 
thing else. It is the penance of an uneasy mind ; a 
memorial for pardon addressed as to an enemy, not 
the quest of shelter with an Eternal friend. Vainly 
shall we attempt to get the wages of a campaign that 
has not been fought, and seize the crown of mastery, 
without having ' contended lawfully.' The repose of 
honest victory can only follow the strife of noble con- 
flict ; and the true peace of God is the appointed 
pension of ' the good soldier of Jesus Christ.' 



XXXIV. 



THE REALM OF ORDER. 

1 Corinthians xiy. 33. 

god is not the author of confusion, but of peace, as in all 
churches of the saints. 

In the production and preservation of order, all 
men recognize something that is sacred. We have 
an intuitive conviction that it is not, at bottom, the 
earliest condition of things ; that whatever is, rose out 
of some dead ground-work of confusion and nothing- 
ness, and incessantly gravitates thitherwards again; 
and that, without a positive energy of God, no uni- 
verse could have emerged from the void, or be 
suspended out of it for an hour. There is no task 
more indubitably divine than the creation of beauty 
out of the chaos, the imposition of law upon the 
lawless, and the setting forth of times and seasons 
from the stagnant and eternal night. And so, the 
Bible opens with a work of arrangement, and closes 
with one of restoration; looks round the ancient 
firmament at first, and sees that all is good, and 
surveys the new heavens at last, to make sure that 
evil is no more. Far back in the old Eternity, it 
ushers us into God's presence; and he is engaged in 
dividing the light from the darkness, and shaping the 
orbs that determine days and years; turning the 



430 



THE HEALM OF ORDEE. 



vapors of the abyss into the sweet breath of life, 
teaching the little grass to grow, and trusting the 
forest tree with the seed that is in itself, to be punc- 
tually dropped upon the earth ; filling the mountain 
slope, the sedgy plain, the open air, the hidden deep, 
with various creatures kept by happy instincts within 
the limits of his will ; and setting over all, in likeness 
of himself, the adapting intellect, the affectionate 
spirit, and mysterious conscience, of lordly and re- 
flective man. The birth of order was the first act of 
God, who rested not till all was blessed and sancti- 
fied. And far forward in the Eternity to come, we 
are brought before his face again for judgment. 
The spoiling of his works, the wild wandering from 
his will, he will bear no more ; the disorder that has 
gathered together, shall be rectified; he will again 
divide the darkness from the light; and confusion 
and wrong, — all that hurts and destroys, — shall be 
thrust into unknown depths; while wisdom and holi- 
ness shall be as the brightness of the firmament and 
as the stars forever and ever. As it was when he 
was Alpha, so will it be when he is Omega. He is 
one that " loveth pureness" still; and the stream of 
Providence, — the river that went out of Eden, — 
however foul with the taint of evil while it takes its 
course through human history, shall become the river 
of the water of life, clear as crystal, that nurtures the 
secret root of all holy and immortal things. 

This Divine regard for order proceeds from an 
attribute in which we also are made to participate, 
and which puts us into awful kindred with his per- 
fections. Intelligent Free-will, — a self-determining 
Mind, — is the only true, orignating Cause of which 
we can even conceive; the sole power capable of 



THE EEALM OE ORDER. 



431 



giving Law where there was none before, and of 
creating the Necessity by which it is thenceforth 
obeyed. There was a Will before there was a Must. 
Nothing else, we feel assured, could avail, amid a 
boundless primeval unsettledness, to mark out a 
certain fixed method of existence, and no other, and 
make it to be; could draw forth an actual, defined, 
and amenable universe from the sphere of infinite 
possibilities. The indeterminate, the chaotic, lies in 
our thought behind and around the determinate and 
constituted ; and to sketch a positive system and bid 
its vivid lines of order shine on the dark canvas of 
negation, is the special office of the free, self-moving 
spirit, whereby God lifts us up above nature into the 
image of himself. Hence we too, in proportion as 
we approach him, shall put our hand to a light task; 
shall organize the loose materials that, touched by a 
creative will, may cease to be without form and void ; 
shall set out expanse of years into periods ruled by 
the lights of duty, and refreshed by the shades of 
prayer; shall mould every shapeless impulse, subdue 
every rugged difficulty, fill every empty space of 
opportunity with good, and breathe a living soul into 
the very dust and clod of our existence. As ' God is 
not the author of confusion, but of peace,' so the 
service of God infuses a spirit of method and propor- 
tion into the outward life and the inward mind; and 
pure religion is a principle of universal order. 

No two things indeed can be more at variance with 
each other, than a devout, and an unregulated life. 
Devotion is holy regulation, guiding hand and heart; 
a surrender of self-wili, — that main source of uncer- 
tainty and caprice, — and a loving subordination to 
the only rule that cannot change. Devotion is the 



432 



THE REALM OF ORDEE. 



steady attraction of the soul towards one luminous 
object, discerned across the passionate infinite, and 
drawing thoughts, deeds, affections, into an orbit 
silent, seasonal, and accurately true. In a mind 
submitted to the touch of God, there is a certain 
rhythm of music, which, however it may swell into 
the thunder or sink into a sigh, has still a basis of 
clear unbroken melody. The discordant starts of 
passion, the whimsical snatches of appetite, the in- 
articulate whinings of discontent, are never heard; 
and the spirit is like an organ, delivered from the 
tumbling of chance pressures on its keys, and given 
over to the hand of a divine skill. Nay, so inexorable 
is the demand of religion for order, that it shrinks 
from any one allowed irregularity, as the musician 
from a constant mistake in the performance of some 
heavenly strain. Its perpetual effort is to prevail 
over all things loose and turbid; to swallow up the 
elements of confusion in human life; and banish 
chance from the soul; as God excludes it from the 
universe. It is quite impossible that an idle, float- 
ing spirit can ever look with clear eye to God ; 
spreading its miserable anarchy before the symmetry 
of the creative Mind; in the midst of a disorderly 
being, that has neither centre nor circumference, 
kneeling beneath the glorious sky, that everywhere 
has both; and for a life that is all failure, turning to 
the Lord of the silent stars, of whose punctual thought 
it is, that 'not one faileth.' The heavens, with their 
everlasting faithfulness, look down on no sadder con- 
tradiction, than the sluggard and the slattern in their 
prayers. 

To maintain the sacred governance of life is to 
recognize and preserve the due rank of all things 



THE REALM OF ORDER. 



433 



within and without. For there is a system of ranks 
extending ^through the spiritual world of which we 
form a part. The faculties and affections of the single 
mind are no democracy of principles, each of which, 
in the determinations of the will, is to have equal 
suffrage with the rest; but an orderly series, in which 
every member has a right divine over that below. 
The individuals composing the communities of men 
do not arrange themselves into a dead level of spirits, 
in which none are above and none beneath ; but 
there are centres of natural majesty that break up the 
mass into groups and proportions that you cannot 
change. And man himself, by the highest Will, is 
inserted between things of which he is lord, and 
obligations which he must serve. In short, the hie- 
rarchy of nature is Episcopalian throughout; and in 
conforming to its order, the active part of our duty 
consists in this; that we must rule and keep under 
our hand whatever is beneath us ; assigning to every- 
thing its due place. 

The whole scheme of our voluntary actions, all 
that we do from morning to night of every day, is 
beyond doubt entrusted to our control. No power, 
without our consent, can share the monarchy of this 
realm, or constrain us to lift a hand or speak a word, 
where Resolution bids us be still and silent. And 
from our inmost consciousness we do know, that, 
whenever we will, we can make ourselves execute 
whatever we approve, and strangle in its birth what- 
ever we abhor. To-morrow morning, if you choose 
to take up a spirit of such power, you may rise like a 
soul without a past; fresh for the future as an Adam 
untempted yet; disengaged from the manifold coil 
of willing usage, and with every link of guilty habit 
37 



434 



THE HEAL}! Ox OEDEK. 



shaken off. I know, indeed, that you will not; that 
no man ever will; but the hindrance is with yourself 
alone. The coming hours are open yet, — pure and 
spotless receptacles for whatever you may deposit 
there; pledged to no evil, secure of no good; neither 
mortgaged to greedy passion, nor given to generous 
toil. There they lie in non-existence still ; ready to be 
organized by a creative spirit of beauty, or made foul 
with deformity and waste. Perhaps it is this thought, 
this secret sense of moral contingency, that gives to 
so simple a thing as the beat of a pendulum, or the 
forward start of the finger on the dial, a solemnity 
beyond expression. The gliding heavens are less 
awful at midnight than the ticking clock. Their 
noiseless movement, undivided, serene, and everlast- 
ing, is as the flow of divine duration, that cannot 
affect the place of the eternal God. But these sharp 
strokes, with their inexorably steady intersections, so 
agree with our successive thoughts, that they seem 
like the punctual stops counting off our very souls 
into the past; — the flitting messengers that dip for 
a moment on our hearts, then bear the pure or sinful 
thing irrevocably away; — light with mystic hopes as 
they arrive, charged with sad realities as they depart. 
So passes, and we cannot stay it, our only portion of 
opportunity; the fragments of that blessed chance, 
which has been travelling to us from all eternity, are 
dropping quickly off. Let us start up and live ; here 
comes the moments that cannot be had again; some 
few may yet be filled with imperishable good. 

There is no conscious power like that which a 
wise and Christian heart asserts, when resolved to 
absorb the dead matter of its existence, and from the 
elements of former waste and decay to put forth a 



THE REALM OF ORDER. 



435 



new and vernal life. The accurate economy of 
instants, the proportionate distribution of duties, the 
faithful observance of law, as it is an exercise of 
strength, so gives a sense of strenuous liberty. Com- 
pared with this, how poor a delusion is the spurious 
freedom which is the idler's boast! He says that he 
has his time at his disposal; but in truth, he is at the 
disposal of his time. No novelty of the moment 
canvasses him in vain ; any chance suggestion may 
have him ; whiffed as he is hither and thither like a 
stray feather on the wandering breeze. The true 
stamp of manhood is not on him, and therefore the 
image of godship has faded away; for he is Lord of 
nothing, not even of himself ; his will is ever waiting 
to be tempted, and conscience is thrust out among 
the mean rabble of candidates that court it. The 
wing of resolution, mighty to lift us nearer God, is 
broken quite, and there is nothing to stay the down- 
ward gravitation of a nature passive and heavy too. 
And so, first a weak affection for persons supplants 
the sense of right; to be itself, in turn, destroyed by 
a baser appetite for things. This woful declension 
is the natural outgoing of those who presume to try 
an unregulated life. A systematic organization of 
the personal habits, devised in moments of devout 
and earnest reason, is a necessary means, amid the 
fluctuations of the spirit, of giving to the better mind 
its rightful authority over the worse. Those only 
will neglect it, who either do not know their weak- 
ness, or have lost all healthy reliance on their strength. 

It is a part then of the faithfulness and freedom of 
a holy mind, to keep the whole range of outward ac- 
tion under severe control ; to administer the hours in 
full view of the vigilant police of conscience ; and to 



436 



THE REALM OE OEDEE. 



introduce even into the lesser materials of life the 
precision and concinnity which are the natural sym- 
bols of a pure and constant spirit. And it belongs 
to the humility of a devout heart, not to trust itself 
to the uncertain ebb and flow of thought, and float 
opportunity away on the giddy waters of inconstan- 
cy ; but to arrange a method of life in the hour of 
high purpose and clear insight, and then compel the 
meaner self to work out the prescription of the 
nobler. Yet this, after all, though an essential check 
to our instability, is but the beginning of wisdom. 
The mere distribution of action in quantity, however 
well proportioned, does not fulfil the requisites of a 
Christian order. This surveyor's work, — this par- 
titioning out the superficies of life, and marking off 
the orchard and the field, the meadow and the grove, 
— will make no grass to grow, will open no blossom 
and mature no seed. The seasonal culture of the 
soul requires all this; yet may yield poor produce, 
when this is done. Without the deeper symmetry 
of the spirit, the harmonious working of living powers 
there, the boundaries of action, however neat, will be 
but a void framework, enclosing barrenness and sand. 
Despise not the ceremonial of the moral life ; it is 
our needful speech and articulation; but oh! mistake 
it not for the true and infinite worship that should 
breathe through it. Mere mechanism, however perfect, 
has this misfortune, that it cannot set fast its own 
loose screws, but rather shakes them into more fright- 
ful confusion; till the power, late so smooth, works 
only crash and ruin, and goes headlong back to 
chaos. And so it is where there is nothing pro- 
founder than the systematizing faculty in the organ- 
ization of a man's life. Destitute of adaptive and 



THE REALM OF ORDER. 



437 



restorative energy, with no perception of a spiritual 
order that may remain above disturbance, and ex- 
press itself through obstructions all the more, inter- 
ruptions bewilder and upset him. Ill health in 
himself or the affliction of others, that stop his 
projects and give him pause by a touch on his 
affections, irritate and weary him ; he grows dizzy 
with the inroads on his schemes, gives up the count 
so hopefully begun, and runs down in the rapid dis- 
cords. The soul of Christian order has in it some- 
thing quite different from this; more like the blessed 
force of nature that consumes its withered leaves as 
punctually as they fall, and so makes the spread of 
decay a thing impossible; that has so unwearied an 
appetite for the creation of beauty and productive- 
ness, that it makes no complaint of rottenness and 
death, but draws from them the sap of life, and 
weaves again the foliage and the fruit. No less a 
vital spontaneity than this is needed in the Christian 
soul; for in human life, as in external nature, the 
elements of corruption and disorder are always accu- 
mulating; and unless they are to breed pestilence, 
must be kept down and effectually absorbed. As in 
science, so in- practical existence, our theory or ideal 
must ever be framed upon assumptions only partially 
true. The conditions required for its fulfilment will 
never be present all at once and all alone; so that the 
realization will be but approximate ; and a constant 
tension of the soul is needed to press it nearer and 
nearer to the ultimate design. For want of a reli- 
gious source, an exact apparent order in the life may 
co-exist with an essential disorder secreted within. 
Are we not conscious that so it is, whenever the toil 
of our hands, though punctually visited, receives no 
37* 



438 



THE REALM OF ORDER. 



consent of our hearts; when the spirit flies with 
heavy wing from reach to reach of time, and, like 
Noah's dove, seeing only wave after wave of a dreary 
flood, finds no rest for the sole of its foot, till it gets 
back to the ark of its narrow comforts? Is it not 
a plain inversion of the true order of things, when we 
do our work for the sake of the following rest, in- 
stead of accepting our rest as the preparative for 
work ? And while this continues to be the case, 
there will be a hidden aching, a dark corroding speck 
within the soul, which no outward method or pro- 
portion can ever charm away. Nor can the precision 
of the will be even sustained at all without the 
symmetry of the affections. As well might you 
think to set your broken compass right by hand ; if it 
be foul and stiff, swinging and trembling no more in 
obedience to its mysterious attraction, its blessed 
guidance is gone; and after the first straight line 
of your direction, you sail upon the chances of de- 
struction. 

To prevent this evil, of method just creeping up 
the lower part of life, and passing no further, no posi- 
tive rule, from the very nature of the case, can well be 
given. We can only say that, besides subjecting 
whatever is beneath us, there is also this passive 
part of Christian order, that we must surrender our- 
selves entirely to what is above us ; and having put 
all lesser things into their place, we must then take 
and keep our own. Could indeed this proportion of 
the affections invariably remain, it would supersede 
all our mechanism, and take care of the outward 
harmony; and we should have no need to apply the 
rules of a Franklin to the spirit of a Christ. Bat 
even short of this blessed emancipation, we should 



THE REALM OF ORDER. 



439 



rise into a higher atmosphere ; escaping the wretched 
thraldom of reluctant duties ; and yield a free con- 
sent, through love, to that which else were irksome ; 
quietly depositing ourselves on every work that 
brings its sacred claim, and moving in it, instead of 
writhing to get beyond it. They tell you that habit 
reconciles you in time to many unwelcome things. 
Let us not trust to this alone. Custom indeed 
sweetens the rugged lot when the cheerful soul is in 
it; it does but embitter it the more, when the soul 
stays out of it. But when harshnesses are borne, and 
even spontaneously embraced, for the sake of God 
who hints them to our conscience, a perfect agree- 
ment ensues between the spirit and the letter of our 
life. We feel no weariness ; delivered now from the 
intolerable burthen of flagging affections. We are 
disturbed by no ambitions; conscious of no jealousies 
of other men ; for competition has no place in things 
divine; and even in lower matters, it is, to the 
thoughtful and devout, but a quiet interrogation of 
Providence ; and the true heart that prefers the ques- 
tion cannot be discontented with the answer. We 
cease to desire a change ; we feel that life affords no 
time for restlessness ; that in persistency is our only 
hope ; and a blessed conservatism of spirit comes 
over us, that claims nothing but simple leave to go 
on serving and loving still. And so Existence, to 
the devout, becomes, not confused, but peaceful, like 
a Service in the Churches of the Saints. 



XXXV. 

CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF MERIT. 



Luke xyii. 10. 

so likewise ye, when ye shall ha ye done all those things 
which are commanded you, say, ' we are unprofitable ser- 
vants ; we ha ye done that which was our duty to do. ' 

To a thoughtful interpreter of human nature, no- 
thing so plainly reveals the hidden principle of a 
man's life, as the estimation in which he holds him- 
self. Whether the standard which guides him be 
conventional, moral, or divine ; whether the invisible 
presence that haunts him be that of the world's 
opinion, or his own self-witness, or the eye of God, 
— may be seen in the contented self-delusion, or in- 
telligent self-knowledge, or noble self-forgetfulness, 
which reveal themselves through his natural language 
and demeanor. Too often you meet with a man 
who manifestly looks at himself with the eyes of 
others ; — and those too, not the wise who are above 
him, but the associates on the same level or the in- 
feriors beneath it, to whom he may be supposed an 
object of conspicuous attention. He stands well 
with himself, because he stands well with them; and 
nothing would make him angry with himself, except 
the forfeiture of his position among them. Their 
expectations from him being satisfied, or somewhat 



CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF MERIT. 



441 



more, he thinks his work is done, and turns loose 
into a holiday life, to do as he likes at his own un- 
licensed will. Their sentiments are the mirror, by 
which he dresses up his life ; as his self-complacency 
is but the reflection of their smiles, his self-reproach 
is but the imitation of their frowns, — mere regret for 
error, not remorse for wrong; overheard in the cry of 
vexation, ' Fool that I am ! ' not in the whisper of 
penitence, ' God be merciful to me a sinner ! ' He 
every way impresses you with the conviction that, if 
nothing were demanded of him, nothing would be 
given ; that he simply comes into the terms imposed 
by men as conditions of peace and good fellowship ; 
and did all men resemble him, the Cynic's theory 
would not be far wrong, that morality is but the 
conciliation of opinion, and society a company for 
mutual protection. 

However, if all men were such as he, and brought 
no strictly moral element into human affairs, it is 
plain that this much-vaunted power of 'public opin- 
ion' could never get formed. Till somebody has a 
.conscience, nobody can feel a law. Accordingly, we 
everywhere meet with a higher order of men, who 
not only comprehend the wishes, but respect the 
rights, of others ; who are ruled, not by expectation 
without, but by the sense of obligation within; who 
do, not the agreeable, but the just; and, even amid 
the storm of public rage, can stand fast, with rooted 
foot and airy brow, like the granite mountain in the 
sea. Noble, however, as this foundation of upright- 
ness always is, there may arise from it a self-estimate 
too proud and firm. If the stern consciousness of 
right have no softening of human affection, and 
kindling of diviner aspiration, it will give the lofty 



342 



CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF MERIT. 



sense of personal merits, that makes the Stoic, and 
misses the Saint. To walk beneath the porch is still 
infinitely less than to kneel before the cross. We do 
nothing well, till we learn our worth ; nothing best, 
till we forget it. And this will not be till, besides 
being built into the real veracious laws of this world, 
we are also conscious of the inspection of another ; 
till we live, not only fairly among equals, but sub- 
missively under the Most High ; and while casting 
the shadow of a good life on the scene below, lie in 
the light of vaster spheres above. Virtue, feeling its 
deep base in earth, lifts its head aloft; sanctity, con- 
scious of its far-off glimpse at heaven, bends it low. 
And yet, outwardly, they are not different, but the 
same ; one visible character may correspond with 
either; only standing amid relations incomplete in the 
one case, completed in the other. They are but as the 
different aspects of the granite isle of which we spake. 
Let clouds roof out the heaven and shut a darkness in, 
and its gray crags look down, with the grandeur of a 
gloomy monarch, sheltering the thunder and defying 
the flood. Sweep the rack away, and throw upon the 
hemisphere of morning air, and it lies low in the soft 
light, and sleeps with upturned gaze, like a sunny 
child of deep and sky, cradled on the summer sea. 

How is it that minds equally engaged in the outward 
service of duty, think of themselves so differently ? 
Whence the self-reliance, bordering on self-exaggera- 
tion, of a Zeno, a Franklin, a Bentham? — the divine 
humility of a Pascal, a Howard, a Channing, and of 
the Master whose lineaments they variously reflect ? 
The answer will present itself spontaneously, if we 
inquire into the true doctrine of merit. This word, 
which has its equivalent in every language, expresses 



CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF MERIT. 



343 



a meaning familiar, I suppose, to all men ; and by- 
referring to a few common modes of speech and 
thought, the contents of that meaning may be un- 
folded and denned. 

There is no merit in paying one 's debts. To make 
such an act a ground of praise infallibly betrays a 
base mind and a dishonest community. This can- 
not well be denied by any clear-thoughted man, free 
from the influence of passion. Whatever be the 
practice of society with respect to the insolvent, sure- 
ly it is a mean perversion of the natural moral sense 
to imagine that his temporary inability, or length of 
delay, can cancel one iota of his obligation; these 
things only serve to increase its stringency ; tardy re- 
paration being a poor substitute for punctual fidelity. 
I am far from denying that circumstances of special 
and blameless misfortune may justify him in accept- 
ing the voluntary mercy of friends willing to ' forgive 
him all that debt.' But whoever avails himself of 
mere legal release as a moral exemption, is a candi- 
date for infamy in the eyes of all uncorrupted men. 
The law necessarily interposes to put a period to the 
controversy between debtor and creditor, and prohibit 
the further struggle between the arts of the one and 
the cruelty of the other; but it cannot annul their 
moral relation. Obligation cannot, any more than 
God, grow old and die ; till it is obeyed, it stops in 
the present tense, and represents the eternal Now. 
Time can wear no duty out. Neglect may smother 
it out of sight; opportunity may pass, and turn it 
from our guardian angel into our haunting fiend; but 
while it yet remains possible, it clings to our identity, 
and refuses to let us go. It was the first sign of 
the rich publican's change from the heathen to the 



444 



CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF MERIT. 



Christian mind that he ' restored four-fold ' the gains 
that were not his. And our conversion yet remains 
to be wrought, until, instead of applauding as of 
high desert the man who repairs at length the mis- 
chief he has done, we condemn to shame every one 
who can buy an indulgence with an unpaid debt. 

Again, there is no merit in speaking or acting' the 
simple truth; in keeping one's promissory word, and 
doing one's stipulated work. In this there is no 
more than all men are entitled to expect from us. It 
is their manifest right; and if, instead of respecting 
its demands, we give them falsehoods with our lips 
and life, we not merely lose all claim to their praise, 
but, sinking far from innocence, become obnoxious 
to their reproach. From this rule there are, no doubt, 
many apparent departures in the practical conduct of 
human affairs; and we often make it a theme for 
public eulogy that a citizen has lived among us with 
unbroken pledge and faithful achievement. This, 
however, is hardly an example of the strict and un- 
mixed judgment of conscience, but rather a conces- 
sion from that pity and fear with which we look on 
human nature tried with so long a strife. It springs 
up on the retrospect of an entire life with its visible 
temptations prostrated and its strength triumphant ; 
and would be put to silence by a single instance of 
evident bad faith. Moreover, in cases of such un- 
violated truth, there is always something more than 
simple abstinence from wrong. They imply, by their 
very persistency, a force of character, which cannot 
have spent itself in mere standing still, however" 
firm. The man who, under all deflecting importu- 
nities, can keep an immovable footing against the 
wrong, has a life within him that, when the assault 



CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF MERIT. 



445 



is over, will push on the victories of right; and we 
justly accept the negative strength, as symptomatic 
of the positive power of conscience. On this account 
it is that we honor him who never lies, nor cheats, 
nor stoops to mean evasions; not that it would be 
otherwise than shameful if he did; but to be through- 
out clear of all such shame is the sign that he has 
not a passive, but a productive soul; and we praise 
him for what he is, rather than for what he is not. 

Once more: there is no merit in restraining the 
appetites from excess; in the avoidance of intem- 
perance and waste; in freedom from wild and self- 
destructive passions, that bear the soul away on a 
whirlwind it cannot rule. We expect of every man, 
that he shall remain master of himself; and we feel 
that he does not reach the natural level of his human- 
ity, unless he governs what he knows to be beneath 
him, and as ' a faithful and wise steward,' manifests 
a moral prudence in administering the domain of its 
own spirit. A well-ordered economy of the personal 
habits brings so evident a return of value to those 
who practise it, and is so fit a consequence of the 
natural rights of reason over the will, that it is rather 
the assumed ground and indispensable condition, 
than the actual essence, of any excellence we can 
honor and revere. If ever we bestow upon it more 
than a cold commendation, it is in cases where it 
may be taken as a pledge of something further, that 
does not directly meet the eye ; where it appears, for 
instance, amid examples of guilty license, and in- 
ducements to a low and lax career; and can only 
have grown up by the triumph of pure and divine 
energy within, under the obstructions of circumstance 
and the contradictions of men. But except when we 
38 



446 



CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF MERIT. 



thus find some saint amid the brood of Circe, we 
deem it but poor praise to a human soul, that it is 
not like the brutes, the creature of impulse and slave 
of chance affection. 

From these instances it is easy to collect one of 
the essential characteristics of all merit. There is no 
room for it in the sphere of personal and prudential 
conduct; it can arise only in the case of duty to 
others. And there it obtains no admission, so long 
as we merely satisfy the claims of justice, and com- 
ply with that which law or honor have written in the 
bond. Failing in this, we incur guilt and the merit; 
not failing, we are entitled to no praise. The first 
entrance of merit, according to the sentiments of all 
men, is where our performance goes beyond the ac- 
knowledged rights of another; and we spontaneously 
offer what human obligation could not ask. 

There is a second characteristic admitted to be 
essential to every meritorious act. It must be all 
our own, the spontaneous product of our individual 
will and affection. If in the delirium of fever, or the 
fancies of somnambulism, you are led, by the com- 
mand of some guide who wields you at his word, to 
put forth a deed of outward charity, you will take no 
more credit for it, than for the heroic achievements 
you may accomplish in your dreams. You had no 
more to do with the act than with the sin of Lucifer. 
You were not the agent in the case ; you were only 
the stage on which the phenomenon took place. 
And show me in any instance, that a man is not 
the originating cause of his own apparent deed, but 
in this manifestation of him, only an effect of some 
extraneous power; show me that he would never have 
done the kindly thing, had he not been put up to it 



CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF MERIT. 



447 



by a force that pulls the wires of his obedient mind ; 
show me even, that he had some personal end in 
view, and proposed to make an investment in gener- 
osity ; — and it is in vain that you ask for my admi- 
ration ; as soon could I respect the industry of a clock, 
or the industry of a galvanized limb. If the prompter 
once peeps out, I know the whole to be a piece of 
acting, and the illusion of reality is instantaneously 
gone ; only, instead of the avowedly fictitious, I have 
the insidiously false, and am the dupe, not of pro- 
fessed entertainment, but of real deception. Sponta- 
neity then is an essential to each man's good desert; 
and in precise proportion to the partnership there 
may be in his agency, will be the diminution of his 
share. 

Here then we have the two requisites and charac- 
teristics of every meritorious act; it must overlap the 
limits of mere justice, and go beyond the strict rights 
of the being to whom it is directed ; and it must be 
all our own. Take away either of these properties, 
and merit disappears. 

Now it is the characteristic of all Moral systems, 
as such, that they allow the reality of human merit; 
of all religious systems, as such, and of the simply 
religious heart that has no system at all, that they 
disown it. The different forms of faith, however, do 
this in different ways; and the following distinction 
is to be carefully observed; — the spurious represen- 
tations of Christianity take away all demerit at the 
same time ; while the true have in them this mystery, 
that while they remove the lustre of merit, the sha- 
dow of demerit remains. 

Every Fatalist or Predestinarian scheme destroys 
merit by denying that our actions are our own, and 



448 



CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF MERIT. 



referring them wholly to powers of which we are 
not lords but slaves. We are ourselves, it is con- 
tended, true creators of nothing; but creatures, ab- 
solutely disposed of by mightier forces, like clay 
whirled upon the potter's wheel, and moulded by his 
hand; — determinate products turned out from the 
great workshop of the universe, with functions pure- 
ly mechanical, like a more complex kind of tool. 
That we seem to have a self-moving power, to put 
forth spontaneous and underived effort belonging 
wholly to our personality, is, in the. view of this doc- 
trine, an illusion of our short-sightedness, due only to 
our ignorance or forgetfulness of the prime mover of 
our energies. All this, like the heaving of a steam- 
engine, or the laboring of a ship at sea, is done for 
and upon us, not by us; and when, in our remorse 
for the past, and our resolves for the future, we as- 
sume that we are in a responsible trust for our own 
spiritual state, we are dupes of an ignorant delu- 
sion, at which philosophic spirits stand by and smile. 
Fast locked within the series of natural effects, we 
are the ground on which phenomena appear for 
their display, but not their cause; the inventor and 
exhibitor stands behind the scenes, and shows us 
off. Life, in short, is but the long phantasm of 
the sleep-walker; replete with the consciousness of 
nimble thoughts, and vivid passions, and precari- 
ous glories and strenuous deeds, — a perfect con- 
flict of awful forces to him that is within it; but to 
the eye of waking truth outside, still and passive 
as the sculptured slumber of a marble image; a 
casket of mimic battles and ideal woes. With the 
particular sources of fallacy in this scheme, I have 
not now any direct concern. I merely wish to point 



CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF MERIT. 



449 



out that, as it is destructive of any proper Agency in 
the human being, it annihilates at once proper merit 
and demerit; sinks man from a person into a thing; 
loses all moral distinctions, by representing character 
as an incident in one's lot, like health or disease, 
the color of the hair or the robustness of the limbs; 
and renders obligation altogether impossible. And 
so, along with the inflation of self-righteousness, 
which it certainly excludes, this scheme carries away 
also the healthful sorrow of remorse. Its humility is 
not the moral consciousness of unworthiness of char- 
acter, but the physical sense of incapacity of nature; 
and the disciple looks on himself, not as the fallen 
angel, but as the ennobled animal. 

Now, with all this Christianity appears to me to 
stand in strongest contrast. It annihilates merit, not 
by reducing obligation to nothing, but by raising it to 
infinitude. Leaving us the originating causes of our 
own acts, as we had always supposed ourselves to 
be, — confirming us fully in the partnership we thus 
enjoy with the creative energy of God, — it resists all 
enchroachment on our responsibility. But then it 
takes away from us the other element of merit. It 
renders it impossible for our performance to overlap 
and exceed the claims upon our will. For, it changes 
the relations in which, with a conscience simply 
looking round over the level of our equals, we had 
felt ourselves to stand. Putting us under Heaven as 
well as upon the earth, within the presence and sanc- 
tuary of God, while we are at the hearths of our 
friends and in the streets with our fellows, it swal- 
lows up our duties to them in one immense sphere of 
duty to him. Into all our transactions with them, it 
introduces a new and awful partner, to whom we 



450 



CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF MERIT. 



cannot say, ' Thou hast no business between them 
and us; if we satisfy each other, stand thou aloof!' 
As the holy prompter of our conscience, and guardian 
of their claims, he must be omnipresent with his in- 
terpositions. To him therefore our religion makes 
over all their rights; and thereby not only consecrates 
and preserves them, but gives them boundless exten- 
sion. Instantly, we discern as a true demand upon 
us, a thousand things which before we had fancied 
to be at our discretion, and to redound to our praise, 
if we conceded them. Charity merges into justice ; 
love and pity are offsprings that may not be with- 
held; and every former gift becomes a debt. All 
good that is not impossible is a thing now due, and 
is to be performed, not like eye-service unto men, but 
as to God ; a solemn transfer of responsibilities has 
taken place, and all our doings are with the Highest 
now; and, beyond his acknowledged rights we can 
never go, so as to deserve anything of him. Towards 
him obligation is strictly infinite; it covers all our 
possibilities of achievement; for, the very circum- 
stance of any good and noble thing being possible, 
and revealed to our hearts as such, constitutes and 
creates it a duty. Thus suggested, it is one of the 
trusts committed to us by God, — the work which 
he, the great spiritual Artificer, puts into his true 
laborer's hands to execute ; to keep the material, 
and not weave the texture, of his designs, were a 
fase and unfaithful thing. Now, when we have 
completed it, can we establish any title to even the 
most insignificant reward. For, what are wages 
after all? Are they not, in effect, the laborer's 
share of the produce created, only paid in anti- 
cipation of the finished task, — an advance founded 



CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF MERIT. 



451 



on his right to subsist while he toils? And do 
they not cancel all his claim to participate after- 
wards in the product of his skill? This perpetual 
loan by which he lives, and which he works off 
by exertion ever renewed, he cheerfully accepts in 
discharge of all his rights. And what recompenses 
are ever prepaid so freely as those of God? He 
waits not for a week's, not even for a moment's 
industry, but is beforehand with us every way. 
We have never earned the living which he gives 
us in this world; we cannot plead that we have a 
right to be. The field and the faculty of work are 
alike furnished forth by him. A little while ago, 
and we were not here; a little while again and we 
shall be gone from our place ; and have we not 
then been wholly set up at our post in this universe 
by our great Taskmaster? and does he not, by 
the fact of existence itself, make us his perpetual 
debtors ? Yes ; the successive moments, as they 
pass, are the counters of his constant payment; 
which we can neither reckon nor refuse, but only 
hasten to seize and to employ. And so, it is im- 
possible for us ever to overtake his advances. With 
our fastest speed they fly before us still, like the 
shadow which his light behind us casts, only length- 
ening as we go, till it stretches over the brink of 
time, and covers the abyss of eternity. Resign we 
then every high pretension, and stand with bended 
and uncovered head of self-renunciation; grateful for 
every blessing God may send; eager for all the work 
he may appoint; but saying, when all is done, * We 
are unprofitable servants; we have done that' alone, 
and, alas ! far less, ' which it was our duty to do.' 



XXXVI. 



THE CHILD'S THOUGHT. 

1 Corinthians xiii. 11. 

when i "was a child, i spake as a child, i "understood as a child, 
i thought as a child ; but when i became a man, i put away 
childish things. 

The noblest prophets and apostles have been chil- 
dren once ; lisping the speech, laughing the laugh, 
thinking the thought of boyhood. Undistinguished 
as Paul then was amid the crowd, unless by more 
earnest and confiding eye, there was something pass- 
ing within him of which, it would seem, he preserved 
in the kindling moments of his manly soul, the mem- 
ory and the trace. And there are few men, I suppose, 
who do not at times send a gentle glance into their 
early days ; not only looking upon faces vanished 
now, and listening to voices that have become as 
distant music to the mind ; but remembering the 
throbbing pulse of their own hopes, and the strain 
of heroic purpose, and the awful step of w T onder 
unabated yet. Between ourselves and the apostle, 
however, there is an expressive difference here. We 
usually turn from the past with a sigh, and a secret 
sense of irrevocable loss ; he, with hands clasped in 
thanksgiving, as the glory of an infinite gain. We 
envy our own children ; and would fain put back the 



THE CHILD'S THOUGHT. 



453 



shadow on our dial, to feel again the morning sun 
that shines so softly upon them ; he springs with 
glad escape out of hours too recent from the night, 
and welcomes the increasing glow of an eternal day. 
To us the chief beauty, the only sanctities of life, are 
apt to appear in the shelter of our early years : they 
are like a home that we have deserted, a love that we 
have lost, a faith cheated from our hearts. As we 
ascend the mountain-chain of life, so long a towering 
mystery to our uplifted eye, they lie beneath as the 
green hollow of the Alpine valley ; to whose native 
fields, return is cut off forever ; whence the incense 
of our faith went straight up to heaven, like the first 
smoke from the village hearths into the clear, calm 
air ; whose sunny grass thaws the very heart of us, 
nipped by the glacier's keenest breath ; whose stately 
trees, still dotting the ground with points of shade, 
seem to leave us more exposed amid the scant and 
stunted growths of this wintry height ; and whose 
church-peal floating faintly on the ear, makes us 
shudder all the more at the bleak winds near, boom- 
ing in icy caverns, or whispering to the plains of 
silent snow. But Paul, though not untouched per- 
haps by the poetry of childhood, regarded it without 
regret. With him, its inspiration had risen, not de- 
clined ; its unconscious heaven had not retreated, but 
pressed closer on his heart, till it had mingled with 
his nature, and articulately spoken to itself. He was 
not going up into life to lose himself amid the relent- 
less elements, and get buried by the avalanche of 
years in chasms of Fate ; but to conquer Nature and 
look down ; to stand upon her higher and higher 
watch-towers, till he found a way clear into the cli- 
mate of the skies ; and, like Moses on Mount Nebo, 



454 



THE CHILD'S THOUGHT. 



with ' his eye not dim.' could discern at the pointing 
of God, 1 the whole land ' of life { unto the utmost sea ; ' 
— and then pass where no horizon bounds the view. 
We, too often, in putting away childish things, part 
with the wrong elements ; losing the heavenly insight, 
keeping the earthly darkness. We put away the 
guileless mind, the pure vision, the simple trust, the 
tender conscience ; and reserve the petty scale of 
thought, the hasty will, the love of toys and strife. 
Paul put away only the ignorance and littleness of 
childhood, bearing with him its freshness, its truth, its 
God, into the grand work of his full age. And hence, 
while our religion lies somewhere near our cradle and 
is a kind of sacred memory, his lived on to speak for 
itself instead of being talked about. It fought all his 
conflicts ; it took the weight out of his chains ; it con- 
densed the lightning of his pen ; and kindled the 
whole furnace of his glorious nature. 

There is a natural difference between the religion 
of childhood, of youth, and of maturity, which appears 
to be very much overlooked in our expectations and 
practices with regard to each. The human mind is 
not the same in all periods of its history ; its wants, 
its faculties, its affections, shift their relative propor- 
tions, as that history proceeds; and a power, which, 
like religion, is to hover over it continuallv. and to lift 
it by a constant attraction, must not always suspend 
itself over the same feelings, and offer one invariable 
representation. Its resources are infinite ; its beauty 
inexhaustible; its truth dipped in every color into 
which the light of heaven is broken by the prism of 
Thought; and it must adapt itself to the character- 
istics of every period which needs its sway. Nor 
is there the least art or cunning policy implied it 



THE CHILD'S THOUGHT. 



455 



this ; but only a soul of natural sympathy, to take on 
it at will the burthens of the child, the youth, the 
man ; to see their love, their fear, their admiration ; 
to doubt their doubts, and pray their prayers ; and 
simply to avoid the cruelty of offering the garment of 
grief to the spirit of joy, and singing songs to the 
heavy heart. Some features belonging to the early 
period of life, which should be borne in mind in the 
conduct of the religious element of education, I 
would briefly indicate. 

Childhood is emphatically the period of safe in- 
stincts ; permitting it to try awhile the unreflective 
life of creatures less than human. Only the ingenuity 
of artificial corruption can spoil them. In themselves, 
they are incapable of excess, and offer few tempta- 
tions to wrong, that are not adequately counteracted 
by some balancing affection. They simply ask to be 
let alone, and suffer no perversion ; give them room 
to open out ; use no premature compression to drive 
them back ; and they will check each other, and find 
a fairer proportion than can be given by your rules. 
In these shrewd days, in which it has become the 
cleverest thing to suspect the Devil everywhere, and 
God nowhere, it is thought romantic to believe in 
the innocence of childhood ; pardonable perhaps in a 
woman, but an intolerable softness in a man. And 
possibly it is, if applied to the actual children, once 
born in the image of God, but long ago twisted into 
our miserable likeness, by the sight of our luxuries, 
the contagion of our selfishness, the hearing of our 
lies ; possibly it is, if applied to those whom the 
church teaches to blaspheme their own nature, to 
confess a sham guilt, and prate of an unreal rescue 
from an unfelt danger. For, the world is often right 



456 



THE CHILD'S THOUGHT. 



in fact, though wrong in truth ; and the church has 
acted with a cunning theology in this matter; having 
first spoiled all the children with its inanities, and 
then produced them in its court in evidence of origi- 
nal depravity. But if both "World and Church will 
only learn what the child's simple presence may teach, 
instead of teaching what he cannot innocently learn, 
the truth may dawn upon them, that he seldom re- 
quires to be led, — only not to be misled. A reform 
in the nursery will change the creed of Christendom ; 
no hierarchy can stand against it; and the pinafore 
of the child will be more than a match for the frock of 
the bishop and the surplice of the priest. If it be 
romance to look with something of reverent affection 
at the being not yet remote from God, it is at least a 
romance that has come to us on a voice most full of 
grace and truth ; it breathes fresh from the hills of 
Nazareth ; and its emblem is that wondering infant 
in the arms of Christ, visible thence over all the earth, 
as the chosen watch at the gate of heaven. What- 
ever be thought of this doctrine, it cannot be denied 
that there is in early years, an openness to habit, 
which, while it quickly punishes our neglect, as 
quickly answers to our care. No ready-made ob- 
struction, no ruined work, is given us to undo. 
Wise direction alone is needed ; and such frame- 
work and moulding for the life as we may advisedly 
construct, wiJl receive the growing nature as its silent 
occupant. Nay, this is largely true, not only of the 
acts of the hand, but of the methods and persuasions 
of the mind ; for childhood has a ready faith, that 
may be most blessedly used or most wickedly 
abused; a faith so open to the sense of God, that 
almost unspoken, and as by look of holy sympathy, 



the child's thought. 



457 



it may be given ; so eager, that it will seize on all the 
aliment of thought within its reach ; so trustful, that 
it feels no difficulty, and will cause you none. Your 
problem of guidance will therefore be, not so much 
to evade present embarrassments, as to prevent the 
shock of future perplexities, that must arise, when 
finite thought attempts to grasp an infinite faith, and 
Reason descends to find its own ground, which it 
ever carries with it as it dives. Nor is there any posi- 
tive way of avoiding such a crisis of the soul. Only, 
there is a negative wisdom in not shutting up the 
faith ; in leaving a place for future acquisitions, and 
verge enough for the larger operations of the mind. 
Meanwhile, one thing is to be immediately and al- 
ways observed. Through the susceptibility of the 
religious principle, you may make the child believe in 
any God, from the Egyptian cat to the inspirer of 
Christ. But there is only one God that can really 
possess him with an awful love ; namely, such a one 
as seems to him the highest and the best. And of 
this there can be no constant conception through life ; 
it changes as experience deepens, and affections open 
and die away. Yours cannot be the same as his; 
and if you speak without sympathy, if you forget 
your different latitude of mind, you may repel rather 
than instruct, and give root to a choking thorn of 
hatred, instead of a fruitful seed of love. If the name 
of God is to be sweet and solemn to young hearts, it 
must stand for their highest, not for ours ; and many 
a phrase, rich and deep in tone to us, must be shun- 
ned as sure to jar on spirits differently attuned. Oh ! 
how many obstructions have not veracious men to 
remove ere they can find their true religion! How 

long do they say their prayers, before they pray, and 
39 



458 



THE CHILD'S THOUGHT. 



hear and speak of holy things without a touch of 
worship! How many years did we look up into 
only damp, uncomfortable clouds, that did but wet 
and darken life, ere the pure breeze set in, and swept 
the curtain from the eternal sky, and mingled us with 
the genuine night, and set us eye to eye with the 
watchful stars ! If when I thought as a child, I had 
also dared to speak as a child, should I not have 
said, ' Talk to me no more ; I hate the name of God ? ' 
— yet not the God that ever lives and loves, but the 
stiff idol of the catechism, looking rigorous from the 
narrow niche of a decaying Puritanism. Not the 
God, whose kiss is in the light, whose gladness on 
the riding sea, whose voice upon the storm ; who 
shapes the little grass, and hides in the forest, and 
rustles in the shower ; who bends the rainbow, and 
blanches the snow ; for children delight in nature, 
and from wonder at its beauty easily slide into 
adoration of its Lord. Not the God, who moulded 
the orbs that Newton weighed, and traced the curves 
he measured, and blended the colors he untwined ; 
who was on the earth when no man was, and buried 
the tribes now dug from the mountains and the 
plains; who thinks at this moment every thought 
that science shall develop, and reads the folded scroll 
of future history ; for children delight in knowledge, 
and will kneel with joy to Him, with whom it is at 
once concentred and diffused. Not certainly the God, 
who looked out upon our life and death, our strife and 
sorrow, through the soul of Christ ; who can no more 
abide the hypocrite and the unjust that walk the 
streets to-day, than Jesus the whited sepulchres of 
old ; who lets no widow's mite escape his eye, no 
grateful heart, though of the leper and the heretic, go 



THE CHILD'S THOUGHT. 



459 



without its praise ; for children love justice, mercy, 
and truth, and will trust themselves freely to Him in 
whom they dwell beyond degree. 

Nor is it only in its conception of God, that the 
faith of the child must diner from that of the man. 
Its moral element is also peculiar. To him religion, 
applied to life, presents itself exclusively as a Laiv, — 
and a law that there is no serious difficulty in per- 
fectly obeying. Prescribing a clear scheme of duty, 
and a natural and delightful state of affection, it 
seems to him so simple and practicable, that he is 
full of courage, goes forth with joyous step, and with 
confiding look gazes straight upon the open coun- 
tenance of the future. He cannot understand the 
penitential strains that float from the older world 
around him what have these people been about, that 
they have so much evil to bewail ? They appear to 
him very worthy, nay altogether faithful and merito- 
rious, Christians ; and it is very strange they should 
speak so grievously to God, and stand before him 
with a culprit air and streaming tears. In all this, 
though it has no shadow of pretence, he cannot join ; 
it come sof a deeper truth of nature than he yet has 
reached. His circle of life is narrow, and his idea of 
life lies quiet within it, the thing which he thinks in 
his conscience in the morning, he can do with sedu- 
lous hand before night. His conception of duty is 
legal and human only, not spiritual and divine ; it has 
not yet burst into transcendent aspiration, whose in- 
finite glory in front spreads the inseparable shadow 
of sorrow and ill behind. Sin therefore remains to 
him a dreadful image from some foreign world; a 
spectre of horrid witchery, whose incantations over- 
flow from the cursing lips of bad men, and whose fires 



460 



THE CHILD'S THOUGHT. 



gleam from their impure eyes. But it is a thing that 
is preternatural still ; he looks at it outside his nature, 
as haunting history and the world ; it is not yet a sor- 
rowful reality within. His religion therefore is a cheer- 
ful reverence ; and with its sweet light no tinge should 
mix from the later solemnity and inner conflicts of 
faith. Let him take his vow with a glad voice ; if you 
drive him prematurely to the confessional, you make 
him false. The matin-hymn of life to God is brilliant 
with hope and praise; and without violence to nature, 
you cannot displace it for the deep, low-breathing 
vesper-song; the rosy air of so fresh a time was 
never made to vibrate to that strain. Even from the 
stony heart of old Memnon on the waste, beams vivid 
as the morning wrung a murmur of happy melody ; 
and only at the dip of day did a passing plaint float 
through the desert's stately silence. It is, I am per- 
suaded, a fatal thing, when we men and women, who 
make all the catechisms, and shape all the doctrines, 
and invent all the language of Christian faith, force 
our adult religion with its meditative depth, upon the 
heart of childhood, not yet capacious enough to take 
it in. Puritanism, — fit faith for the stalwart devo- 
tion of earnest manhood in grim times, — cannot be 
adapted to the childish mind ; and the attempt to do 
so will inevitably produce distaste, and occasion re- 
action. This indeed we can hardly doubt is one 
great and permanent cause of the alternations observ- 
able from age to age, in the faith and spirit of com- 
munities ; alternations from enthusiasm to indifference, 
from scepticism to mysticism, from the anxieties 
of moral law to the fervor of devout love, from a 
religion of excessive inwardness to one of outward 
rites or daily work. These changes, though often 



THE CHILD'S THOUGHT. 



461 



long in openly declaring themselves, really and at 
heart take place by generations. The true seat of 
the revolution is in the nursery and the school; the 
children being unable to receive what their fathers 
insist upon giving ; getting gradually loosened from 
a thing that never held them in the hollow of its 
hand, but only detained them by the skirts of the 
garment; and obliged at last to begin anew, and try 
the power of faith's neglected pole. 

As childhood merges into youth, the character- 
istics I have described undergo a rapid and mo- 
mentous change. The early security is gone. The 
stronger powers demand a sterner police of con- 
science to maintain their peace and harmony. The 
whole soul displays, — in its intellect, its desires, its 
sentiments of duty, — the great transition from the 
natural to self-conscious and reflective existence. A 
greater openness to beauty, a more spontaneous 
quickness of affection, a more plenary enthusiasm for 
goodness, combine to waken up unutterable aspira- 
tions, and put upon the countenance of life, as it 
gazes into the young eyes, an expression of divinest 
glory. New conditions are reached under which the 
simple, light-hearted piety cannot longer stay. Duty 
is more than the child's task- work now. So grand 
and awful does it rise, that it makes the actual deeds 
that lie beneath look small, like the cultured garden 
at the Andes' base. Hence, to even the most brave 
and buoyant spirit, the sigh that seemed once so 
strange is not unknown. There is an incipient ex- 
perience of that sad interval between conception, 
now so rich, and execution still so poor, which traces 
the lines of deepest care upon the face of men; — not 
however settled yet into that steady and wonderful 
39* 



462 



THE CHILD'S THOUGHT. 



shadow of guilt, which has spread over the purest 
and most strenuous souls of Christendom ; but com- 
ing fitfully and vanishing again ; taking its turn with 
the bold young faith that nothing worthy can be had 
to good resolve; and only dashing the familiar joy 
with new longings and repentances. Amid the 
fiercer struggle that sets in, the great thing needed is 
strength of Moral Denial^ the courage to say No to 
all questionable men and unquestionable fiends. 
Meanwhile, the very faculties of thought are chang- 
ing too. The appetite for facts is passing into an 
eagerness for truth, full also of deep anxieties. 
Sometimes this noble passion degenerately tends to 
a disagreeable dogmatism, from the mind's having 
lost its childish source of trust, and not yet having 
gained the manly, and for a while holding the faith 
neither in meek dependence on authority, nor in 
genial repose on the universal Reason and Con- 
science, but by the little personal tenure of private 
argument. And sometimes, it is productive of dark 
agonies of doubt and loneliness, drearier than death ; 
leaving the soul exposed upon the field of conflict, 
without a God to strive for, or a weapon for the 
fight. Happily, however, the moral struggle of this 
period comes before the mental; and is well over 
with the faithful, ere the needed strength is broken ; 
and oftener than is guessed, I am convinced, it is the 
issue of the earlier battle of the Conscience, that 
really determines how the later strife of the Intellect 
shall end. Men that have lived a few years of hard- 
ness for God's sake, are rarely left by him to roam 
the wilds of doubt alone. 

It is not much perhaps that direct and purposed 
teaching can contribute to the efficacy of the religious 



THE CHILD'S THOUGHT. 



463 



sentiments. But its happy avail, whatever it be, 
depends on its conformity with the conditions we 
have traced. If only we will not hinder, God has a 
providence most rich in help. Judge not the child's 
mind by your own ; nor fancy that you have a re- 
ligion to create against some powerful resistance, 
which skill is needed to evade or proof to overcome. 
His spirit, if unspoiled, is with you, not against you, 
when you speak of God. Faith is the natural and 
normal state of the human heart; doubt is its fever- 
ish disease ; and that which may be the fit remedy for 
your sickness, may be the poison of his health. He 
needs but the fresh air and pure nourishment of life ; 
give him not the pharmacopoeia of theology, instead 
of the bread of heaven. Disturb him not with un- 
profitable 'Evidences;' they are burdensome as the 
statutes-at-large to the heart of spontaneous justice ; 
misplaced as a Court of Chancery in Heaven. He 
has already the truth which, at best, they can only 
have prevented you from losing; it is not the tenure, 
but the scope, of his belief that is given you to im- 
prove. And in your efforts to enlarge it, it is well to 
proceed outwards rather than inwards; to awaken 
apprehensions of facts, more than reflection upon 
feelings; to glorify for the young disciple's eye the 
world around him, by lifting the veil from what is 
beautiful in nature and great in history; and not 
drive devotion back upon self-wonder and self-scru- 
tiny. The attempt to elicit a religion by interrogat- 
ing his consciousness, and to find in his heart all the 
mysteries of a metaphysical and moral experience, 
will end only with affectation in the appearance, and 
unsoundness at the very core, of his nature. The 
green fruit may be sweetened by confectionary arts; 



464 



THE CHILD'S THOUGHT. 



but the fermentation of the oven is not like the 
ripening of the sun ; if it hastens the relish of the 
moment, it kills the seed of a future hope. Scarcely 
need the child knoiv that he has a soul; it is ours to 
take care that, when at length he finds it, it shall be 
a noble and august discovery; full of admirations 
never to be superseded, and of love that shall bring 
no repentance. For this end, his teaching should be 
mainly external and objective; given with an eye 
ever fixed on the true good which he most readily 
discerns to be great and sacred. Let Palestine be to 
him, as to so many ages it has been, a Holy Land; 
and Jesus in his gentle majesty, the fixed and real- 
ized representative of God; and the high deeds and 
souls of the past be claimed as the expressions of his 
will; and opening glimpses be afforded into that 
natural universe which he rules in the spirit of the 
divine Nazarene. Yet withal, the exigencies of a 
more advanced age, though not anticipated, need 
not be forgotten. Some prospective regard may be 
had to the reflective years which will bring their 
wants at length ; and without teaching any present 
Theory of Religion, its future demands may be 
remembered in a thousand ways. If you would 
prepare, not a mere baby-house, but a right noble 
structure of faith, in which the soul shall have a life- 
interest, you will not only lay the foundation broad 
and deep, but avoid filling in with mean and perish- 
able materials the parts, of which the childish eye 
may see the surface, but which only the manly 
thought can build in strength. The unnoticed outline 
of system may be so drawn, that painful and de- 
forming erasures hereafter may be spared; and by 
mere expansion of the old boundary, and insertion 



THE CHILD'S THOUGHT. 



465 



of new beauty and new health, the earnest veracity 
of the philosopher may be but the glorified piety of 
the child. As larger views of the universe and life 
are opened out, a Providence will be felt to abide 
there still ; the laws which are detected, the unsus- 
pected grandeur that is revealed, will be entered in 
some orderly manner, as parts of the mighty scheme ; 
and, instead of subverting the central and divine 
authority, will be but a province added to its sway. 
And as the years of deep and subjective religion 
come, and the mind sinks in wonder before its own 
mysteries, the self-consciousness, as it starts up, will 
on the instant see God standing in the midst. Such 
at least is the tendency of instruction wisely given. 
Still we must remember that religion is, after all, 
beyond the range of mere tuition. It is not a didactic 
thing that words can give, and silence can withhold. 
It is a spirit; a life; an aspiration; a contagious glory 
from soul to soul; a spontaneous union with God. 
Our inward unfaithfulness is sure to extinguish it; 
our outward policy cannot produce it. To love and 
to do the Holy Will is the ultimate way, not only to 
know the truth, but to lead others to know it too. 



XXXVII. 



LOOKING UP, AND LIFTING UP. 
Romans xv. 1, 3. 

WE THEN THAT ARE STRONG OUGHT TO BEAR THE INFIRMITIES OF 

THE WEAK, AND NOT TO PLEASE OURSELVES: FOR EVEN CHRIST 

PLEASED NOT HIMSELF. 

In the grouping of nature, dissimilar things are 
invariably brought together, and by serving each 
other's wants and furnishing the complement to each 
other's beauty, present a whole more perfect than the 
sum of all the parts. The world we live in is not a 
cabinet of curiosities, in which every kind of thing 
has an assortment of its own, labelled with its ex- 
clusive characters, and scrupulously separated from 
objects of kindred tribe. The free creative hand dis- 
tributes its riches by other order than the formal 
arrangements of a museum ; and, for the happy life 
and action of the universe, blends a thousand things, 
which, for ends of knowledge only, would be kept 
apart. A single natural object may be the focus of 
all human studies, and present problems to puzzle a 
whole congress of the wise. A tropical mountain, 
for instance, is a seat for all the sciences ; and from 
the snows of its summit to the ocean at its base, 
ranges through every realm of the physical world, 
and presents samples of the objects and forces pecu- 



LOOKING UP, AND LIFTING UP. 



467 



liar to each. Its granite masses stand up as the mon- 
umental trophy of nature's engineering; while each 
successive stratum piled around their pedestal is as a 
notch on the score and chronicle of her operations. 
Its melting glaciers and its poised clouds keep her 
chemical register; showing the temperature of her 
laboratory, and marking the dew-point every hour. 
And from the lichen and the moss that paint its 
upper rocks, through the fields and forests of its slope, 
to the sea-weeds that cling around its roots, it carries 
gradations of vegetable and animal life more various 
than can be told by the most accomplished physiol- 
ogist. And perhaps from some platform on its side 
the observatory may be raised; whence the astron- 
omer obtains his glimpse at other regions of creation, 
surveys the lordly estate of the Sun of whom our 
holding is, and espies the realm of space beyond, 
where worlds lie thick as forest-leaves. In this, we 
have only a representation of the harmonizing method 
of creation everywhere, which combines the most un- 
like things into a perfect unity. The several king- 
doms of nature, as we term them, are not like our 
political empires, inclosed with jealous boundaries, 
thick with commercial barriers, and bristling with 
military posts. They pervade and penetrate each 
other; they form together an indissoluble economy; 
the mineral subduing itself into a basis for the 
organic, the vegetable supporting the animal, the 
vital culminating in the spiritual ; weak things cling- 
ing to the strong, as the moss to the oak's trunk, and 
the insect to its leaf; death acting as the purveyor 
of life, and life playing the sexton to death. Mutual 
service in endless gradation is clearly the world's 
great law. 



468 



LOOKING UP, AND LIFTING UP. 



In the natural grouping of human life, the same 
rule is found. It is not similarity but ^similarity, 
that constitutes the qualification for heartfelt union 
among mankind; and the mental affinities resemble 
the electric, in which like poles repel, while the un- 
like attract. A family, — than which there is no 
more genuine type of nature's method of arrange- 
ment, — is throughout a combination of oppo sites ; 
the woman depending on the man, — whose very 
strength, however, exists only by her weakness ; the 
child hanging on the parent, — whose power were no 
blessing, were it not compelled to stoop in gentleness ; 
the brother protecting the sister — whose affections 
would have but half their wealth, were they not 
brought to lean on him with trustful pride; and even 
among seeming equals, the impetuous quieted by the 
thoughtful, and the timid rinding shelter with the 
brave. That there 1 are diversities of gifts ' is the 
reason why there 'is one spirit;' and it is because 
one is reliable for knowledge, and another for resolve, 
and a third for the graces of a balanced mind, that all 
are held in the bonds of a pure affection. 

The same principle distinguishes natural Society 
from artificial Association. The former, springing 
from the impulse of human feeling, brings together 
elements that are unlike ; the latter, directed to spe- 
cific ends, combines the like. The one, completing 
defect by redundance, and compensating redundance 
by defect, produces a real and living unity; the other, 
multiplying a mere fraction of life by itself, retires 
further and further from any integral good, and results 
only in exaggerated partiality. I do not suppose 
that society arises, as some philosophers represent, 
from the sense of individual weakness, and the desire 



LOOKING UP, AND LIFTING UP. 



469 



for consolidated strength; but, it must be owned, the 
instinctive propensities of mankind create nearly the 
same natural classes, as if it were so. The first social 
group would contain a selection of the elements least 
able to subsist apart, and most compact when thrown 
into a system. We all look with involuntary admira- 
tion on the gifts and excellences which are wanting 
in ourselves; and so, ignorance is drawn to know- 
ledge, and artlessness resorts to skill; thought is 
astonished at the achievements of action, and action 
wonders at the mysteries of thought; the irresolute 
trust the courageous, and all find a refuge in the 
noble and the just. So long as personal qualities 
and spontaneous attractions determine the sorting of 
mankind, they will dispose themselves in classes, con- 
taining each, in rugged harmony, the elementary 
materials of our humanity. And when discord arises, 
it is from the presence of too many similar elements, 
which have no respect for one another, no mutual 
want, no reciprocal helpfulness, and which cannot 
therefore co-exist without risk of dissension. Say 
what you will, nature is no democrat, but filled 
throughout with ranks ; and it is only in proportion 
as we recede from the natural affections, and enter 
upon the life of isolated self-will, that dreams of 
social equality take place of the reality of social 
obedience. 

Now the assortments of an old civilization follow 
a law precisely the reverse of that which we have 
ascribed to the Providential rule. It unites all ele- 
ments that are like, and separates the unlike. In- 
stead of throwing men into harmonious groups, it 
analyzes them into distinct classes ; conferring upon 
each sort of human being, a kind of charter of incor- 

40 



470 LOOKING UP, AND LIFTING UP. 

poration; giving them something of a collective will, 
a feeling for their order and a conscious pursuit of its 
special ends. The mutual dependence of differently 
endowed men is not indeed destroyed or even less- 
ened ; but it is shifted from the individual to the 
class. Where, before, person was hopeful to person, 
nation now supplies the want of nation, and one 
mass of labor fills up the deficiency of another. 
This makes the greatest difference in the whole moral 
structure of human life. The contact of the dissimi- 
lar elements, I need not say, is much less close ; vast 
circles, embracing collections of men, hang upon one 
another ; but not the people within them, taken one 
by one. The daily life of each is passed in the 
presence, not of his unequals, but of his equals. He 
lives within his class; he mixes with those who have 
much that he possesses, and little that he wants; and 
who in their turn want little that he can give, and 
much of which he is empty. He finds his own feel- 
ings repeated, his own tastes confirmed, his own 
judgments defended, his own type of wisdom repro- 
duced; and becoming an adept in the characteristics 
of his order, he misses the perfection of his nature. 
He is esteemed in proportion as he exaggerates the 
peculiarities of his class; and he ceases to be its 
model and its idol, the moment he seeks to infuse 
into it the elements of some foreign wisdom, and 
treats with respect the depository of some opposing 
truth. How completely this association by sym- 
pathy has taken place of association by difference, is 
plain to all who look upon the world with open eyes. 
Only those who are of the same sect, of equal rank, 
of one party, of kindred pursuit, of pretty equal 
knowledge, and concurrent tastes, are found often in 



LOOKING UP, AND LIFTING UP. 



471 



the same society. In education the graduated dis- 
tribution of nature is entirely broken up ; all the boys 
collected into one set, all the girls into another ; and 
the several ages, combined in the system of Provi- 
dence, are separated by the arrangements of man. 
Everywhere mechanism and economy are substi- 
tuting, over our world, the classifications of an en- 
campment for the organism of a home. 

I am far from supposing that all this is entirely 
evil. It is a noble distinction of civilized above bar- 
barous man, that he can bear the habitual presence 
of others like himself, without a coercion always sus- 
pended over his passions ; can sympathize with 
them, and join in hearty fraternity for common 
ends of good. To live among our equals teaches, 
without doubt, the two-fold lesson of self-reliance 
and self-restraint ; it enforces a respect for others' 
rights, and a vigilant guardianship of our own ; it 
substitutes prudence for impulse ; and trains the sen- 
timents of justice and veracity. But, while it in- 
vigorates the energies of purpose, it is apt to blight 
the higher graces of the mind ; and, in confirming the 
moralities of the will, to impair the devoutness of the 
affections. A man always among his equals is like 
the school-boy at his play ; whose eager voice and dis- 
putatious claim, and bold defiance of the wrong, and 
merciless derision of the feeble, betray that self-will 
is wide awake, and pity lulled to sleep. But see the 
same child in his home ; and the genial laugh, the 
deferential look, the hand of generous help, the air of 
cheerful trust, show how, with beings above and 
others beneath him, he can forget himself in gentle 
thoughts and quiet reverence. And so it is with us 
all. The world is not given to us as a play-ground 



472 



LOOKING UP, AND LIPTIXG UP. 



or a school alone, where we may learn to fight our 
way upon our own level, and leave others scope for 
a fair race ; but as a domestic system, surrounding 
us with weaker souls for our hand to succor, and 
stronger ones for our heart to serve. If the one set of 
relations are needful for the formation of manly 
qualities, it is the other that gives occasion to the di- 
vine. And if in our own day and our own class, 
the moral and intellectual elements of character have 
become completely and deplorably ascendant over the 
religious ; if, in our honor for truth and justice as 
realities, we have got to think all piety a dream ; if 
life, in becoming a vigorous work, has ceased to be a 
holy worship ; if its tasks are done, and its mysteries 
forgotten, and in being occupied by our WiH it is 
emptied of our God ; if, in the better rule of our 
finite lot, we forget to serve its Infinite Disposer ; — it 
is, in part, because we live too exclusively with our 
equals ; the weak herding with the weak, the strong 
meeting with the strong ; the rich surrounding them- 
selves with the rich, and the taught fearing the more 
taught. We associate with those who think our 
thought, feel our feelings, live our life ; we read the 
books which repeat our tastes, justify our opinions, 
confirm our admirations ; we encourage each other in 
laughing at the excellence to which we are blind, and 
disbelieving the truth to which we have never opened 
our reason, and shuffling away from the affections 
and obligations to which we have a distaste. And 
thus our existence shrinks into a miserable egoism ; 
the theatre on which we stand is surrounded by mir- 
rors of self-repetition ; and we render it impossible to 
escape the monotonous variety of the poor personal 
image. 



LOOKING UP, AND LIFTING UP. 473 

Now, to break this degrading moral illusion, we 
have only to study and adopt the grouping of the 
Christian life; which corrects the classifications of 
our artificial state by restoring the arrangements of 
nature. The faith of Christ throws together the un- 
like ingredients which civilization had sifted out from 
one another. Every true church reproduces the unity 
which the world had dissolved ; and for the preca- 
rious cohesion of similar elements substitutes again 
the attraction of dissimilar. This is done not merely 
by placing us all, as responsible agents, in the same 
venerable relations, and so strengthening the bonds of 
earnest brotherhood. This also is a noble and human- 
izing thing. But Christianity has other influences 
operating to the same end. The moment a man be- 
comes a disciple, his exclusive self-reliance vanishes : 
the rigid lines of his mere manly posture become 
softened ; he trusts another than himself ; he loves a 
better spirit than his own ; and, while living in what 
is human, aspires to what is divine. And in this 
new opening of a world above him, a fresh light 
comes down upon the world beneath him ; the infi- 
nite glory of the heaven reveals the infinite sadness 
there is on earth. Standing no longer on his own 
level, as if that were all, he feels himself in the midst, 
between a higher existence to which he would attain, 
and a lower to which he would give help. Aspiration 
and pity rush into his heart from opposite directions ; 
he forgets himself; the stiff strong footing taken by his 
will gives way ; and he is mellowed into the attitudes 
of looking up and lifting- up. These, it always appears 
to me, are the two characteristic postures of the 
Christian life ; without which our minds, whatever 

their opinions, are empty of all religious element, and 
40* 



474 



LOOKING UP, AND LIFTING UP. 



our hearts, though still humane, lie withered in athe- 
istic death. If there were no ranks of souls within 
our view ; if all were upon a platform of republican 
equality ; if there were but a uniform citizenship of 
spirits, and no royalty of goodness, and no slavery to 
sin ; if nothing unutterably great subdued us to al- 
legiance, and nothing sad and shameful roused us to 
compassion; — I believe that all divine truth would 
remain entirely inaccessible to us, and our existence 
would be reduced to that of intelligent and amiable 
animals ; the noblest chamber of the soul, the vault 
of its hidden worship, remaining locked, the corres- 
ponding region of the universe, the hiding place 
of thunder, — the secret dwelling of the Almighty 
— would be closed against our most penetrating 
suspicions. And as the arrangements by which 
we stand — members of a graduated series, - — with 
beings above and beings below, is the origin of faith ; 
so is the practical recognition of this position the 
great means of feeding the perpetual fountains of the 
Christian life. 

A great German poet and philosopher was fond of 
denning religion, as consisting in a reverence for 
inferior beings. The definition is paradoxical ; but 
though it does not express the essence of religion, it 
assuredly designates one of its effects. True, there 
could be no reverence for lower natures, were there 
not, to begin with, the recognition of a Supreme 
Mind ; but the moment that recognition exists, we 
certainly look on all that is beneath with a different 
eye. It becomes an object, not of pity and protection 
only, but of sacred respect ; and our sympathy, which 
had been that of a human fellow-creature, is con- 
verted into the deferential help of a devout worker of 



LOOKING UP, AND LIFTING UP. 



475 



God's will. And so the loving' service of the weak and 
wanting- is an essential part of the discipline of the 
Christian life. Some habitual association with the 
poor, the dependent, the sorrowful, is an indispensable 
source of the highest elements of character. If we are 
faithful to the obligations which such contact with 
infirmity must bring ; if we gently take the trembling 
hand that seeks our guidance, and spend the willing 
care, and exercise the needful patience ; — why, it 
makes us descend into healthful depths of sorrowful 
affection which else we should never reach ; it first 
teaches us what it is to wear this nature of ours, and 
shows us that we have been men and have not known 
it. It strips off the thick bandages of self, and the 
grave-clothes of custom ; and bids us awake to a life 
which first reveals to us the death-like insensibility 
from which we are emerging. Yes ; and even if we 
are unfaithful to our trust ; if we have let our negli- 
gence have fatal way ; if sorrows fall on some poor 
dependent charge, from which it was our broken pur- 
pose to shield his head ; — still it is good that we 
have known him, and that his presence has been with 
us. Had we hurt a superior, we should have ex- 
pected his punishment ; had we offended an equal, we 
should have looked for his displeasure ; and, these 
things once endured, the crisis would have been passed. 
But to have injured the weak, who must have been 
dumb before us, and look up with only the lines 
of grief which we have traced ; — this strikes an 
awful anguish into our hearts ; a cloud of divine Jus- 
tice broods over us, and we expect from God the pun- 
ishment which there is no man to give. The rule of 
heavenly equity gathers closer to us than before ; and 
we that had neglected mercy are brought low to ask 



476 



LOOKING UP, AND LIFTING UP. 



it. Thus it is that the weak, the child, the outcast, 
they that have none to help them, raise up an Infinite 
protector on their side, and by their very wretched- 
ness sustain the faith of Justice ever on the throne. 

The other half of Christian discipline is of a less 
sad and more inspiring kind; and yet scarcely more 
welcome to the vain and easy and self-complacent 
heart. There are those who pass through life with 
no greater care than to keep in good humor with 
themselves; who dislike the spectacle of anything 
that greatly moves or visibly reproaches them ; who 
therefore shun those that know more, see deeper, aim 
higher, than themselves ; who are ever on the search, 
not for correction of their errors, but for confirmation 
of their prejudices ; not for rebukes to their littleness, 
but for praises of their greatness; and who hurry 
away from the uneasiness of self-confession, if it ever 
begins to flow, amid the mists of self-justification. 
This form of selfishness may not be utterly inconsist- 
ent with the duty on which I have insisted, of lifting 
up the beings beneath us ; but it is the direct con- 
trary of the other portion of the devout life, which 
consists in looking up to all that is above us. It is the 
more needful to guard against the approach of such a 
temper, because aspiration is more easily stifled than 
compassion. Its faint breathings subside through 
mere forgetfulness ; but the paroxysms of pity can 
be quelled only by an active selfishness ; and admira- 
tion may die from dearth of objects, while sympathy 
is in danger rather of exhaustion by their multitude. 
The intercourse with suffering which sustains the 
natural spirit of mercy is so near our doors, as hardly 
to be avoided without compunction ; the intercourse 
with excellence which keeps resolution at its height 



LOOKING UP, AND LIFTING UP. 



477 



is a privilege so rare as not to be attained without 
an effort. Yet without it the higher elements of the 
Christian life must fatally decline. The soul cannot 
permanently feed from its own fuel its nobler fires ; it 
needs at least some stream of pure air from aloft to 
kindle the smouldering thoughts, and make the clouds 
of doubt and heaviness burst into a flame. Only 
the fewest and sublimest natures, — bordering almost 
on the perfectness of Christ, — can remain in the per- 
petual presence, though for ends of genuine mercy, 
of infirm or depraved humanity, without a lowering 
of the moral conceptions, and a depression of hope 
and faith. And by a natural retribution, through 
which God rebukes every partial unfaithfulness, and 
forbids any spiritual grace permanently to grow with- 
out the concurrent culture of them all, the tone of 
pity itself must gradually sink under this deteriora- 
tion ; and every loss from the enthusiasm of a just 
devotion brings a duller shade on the light of human 
love. Hence, the anxiety of every one, in proportion 
to the noble earnestness with which he looks on 
life, to hold himself in unbroken communion with 
great and good minds; never to depart long from the 
touch of their thought and the witness of their career ; 
but to intermingle some divine light of beauty thence 
with the prosaic story of his days. He knows that 
the upper springs of his affections must soon be dry, 
unless he asks the clouds to nourish them. He finds 
that the near inspection and familiar converse of wise 
and holy men is the appointed way by which the 
Infinite God lifts us to himself, and draws us upward 
with perpetual attraction. They are the mediators 
between the earth and heaven, between human reali- 
ties and divine possibilities, between the severities of 



478 



LOOKING UP, AND LIFTING UP. 



duty and the peace of God; compelling us to own, 
how glorious when done are things most difficult to 
do ; how surely the dreams of conscience may become 
the fixed products of history; and how from the 
sighs of achievement may be composed the hymn of 
thanksgiving. If, therefore, ' there be any virtue, if 
there be any praise,' whoever would complete the 
circle of the Christian life will 'think on these 
things;' will thrust aside the worthless swarm of 
competitors on his attention ; in his reading will ex- 
clusively retain, in his living associations will never 
wholly lose, his close communion with the few lofty 
and faithful spirits that glorify our world ; and, above 
all, will at once quench and feed his thirst for highest 
wisdom, by trustful and reverent resort to Him in 
whom sanctity and sorrow, the divine and the hu- 
man, mingled in ineffable combination. 



XXXVIII. 



THE CHRISTIAN TIME-VIEW. 



1 Corinthians vii. 29, 31, 32. 

but this i sat, brethren, the time is short: the fashion 

of this world passeth away. 1 would have you without 

carefulness. 

Paul said this with a meaning which cannot now 
be restored to the w r ords, and which makes them one 
of the grandest expressions of the true Christian 
mind. In no vague, indeterminate sense, such as 
ours, did he declare the remainder of this life 1 short; ' 
and we should much misunderstand his feeling here, 
if we took it for a commonplace sigh over the brief 
lodgment permitted to man on earth. It was not 
that he thought the natural term of our presence 
upon this scene too slight for earnest pursuit, and 
resolute achievement; not that he preached any 
sickly and selfish indifFerentism, esteeming our days 
too transient for love, and our generation too perish- 
able for faithful service. He had no idea that the 
natural term would be completed, or the generation 
run itself out. Yet he felt assured that he and his 
disciples would be survivors of its destruction; and 
so, urges on them pursuits of immeasurable ampli- 
tude, love of a passionless depth, and the service of 
none but eternal obligations. Instead of thinking, as 



4S0 



THE CHRISTIAN TIME-VIEW. 



any man might do, 'Frail tenants are we of this 
solid globe, — phantoms that come and vanish; leav- 
ing nothing permanent but the forms of human 
things, which remain while the beings change, and the 
scene over which we have passed, like troops of suc- 
cessive apparitions;' — the apostle says, 'My friends, 
we should be of quiet heart; we alone are immortal 
amid perishable things, and among the vain shows 
of creation, remain the realities of God ; this world, 
though it seems like rooted adamant, is melting like 
a painted cloud away; the forms of human life, the 
structure of communities, the instinctive relations 
of mankind, which alone appear unchangeable, are 
alone about to cease ; and our individual being, of all 
things seeming the most precarious, is alone inca- 
pable of death.' Paul actually looked around him 
with the persuasion, that the stable products of 
history by which he was environed, the gigantic 
institutions, the proud traditions, the accumulated 
wealth, the disciplined force, the heartless slavery, 
that lay within the grasp of Roman power, existed by 
a feebler tenure than the sickliest infant's life: he 
looked to see them all, and the mighty arm that 
held them, crumbled into sand before his eyes. A 
strange and wondrous expectation this, seen from 
our point of view ! Afloat upon the tide of human 
things, in that poor frail skiff of a Christian Church 
which he took to be an ark of God, how could he 
look at such frowning skies, and hope to ride the 
storm alone? But, in truth it was no common 
tempest that he thought to see; rather did he sail on 
in the belief, that the very seas of time beneath him 
were about to sink and flee away; bearing with them 
the mighty fleet of human things into nothingness 



THE CHRISTIAN TIME-VIEW. 



481 



and night; and leaving only that ark suspended in 
the mid-heaven of God's protection, to grow into a 
diviner world. Well might he exhort his disciples to 
disentangle themselves from the elements about to 
perish ; to disregard the perils, and forget the toils, 
and transcend the anxieties, that beset them. Well 
might he remind them that they were living upon a 
scale, that made it shameful to brood on these things 
like an eager and wayward child; that they might 
live in obedience to their largest thoughts, and com- 
pute their way as through the first spaces of an in- 
finite perspective; and that, to minds so placed, 
nothing was so fitting as a serene spirit of power; 
quiet, not from the extinction, but from the doubling 
of emotion, gathering into the same instant the feel- 
ings of opposite times, and making 'those that weep 
as though they wept not, and those that rejoice as 
though they rejoiced not, and those that used this 
world as though they used it not;' and all, reposing 
4 without carefulness ' on the will of God, seeing 
how soon ' the fashion of this world passeth away.' 

This was the apostle's manner of regarding life ; 
and though we may say his expectation was false, 
we may doubt whether any man since has had one 
half as true. It is, at all events, unlike the error of 
our lower spirits, and arises from a mind, not too 
short-sighted, but too far-seeing, for the conditions 
of our mortal state. It rightly answers the great 
problem between true and false religion, — I should 
rather say between religion and no religion, — '■Which 
is the permanent reality, Life, or the scenery and 
receptacle of life ; the Soul, or the physical Objects 
of the soul?' Whoever deeply feels that one of 
these is eternal, must see the other to be evanescent ; 
41 



482 



THE CHRISTIAN TIME-VIEW. 



for, the duration of either is simply relative to the 
other, which is its only measure ; the elongation of 
the one is to us the abbreviation of the other; and he 
who takes an absolute stand of faith on the stability 
of either, beholds the other passing into naught. To 
dull and heavy souls, — nay, to the lower minds of 
all men, — nothing seems so real as the objects of 
the senses, nothing so secure as the material forms of 
nature, to which from the first every human life has 
stood related; and in proportion as physical science 
confirms this habit of thought, in proportion as mass- 
es and weights and mechanism engage us, or the 
laws of organization, or the outward conditions of 
social life, are we oppressed by the solid sameness of 
these things; individual existence seems the sport of 
a dead fatalism, swallowed up by the hunger of an 
insatiable necessity. To souls like that of Paul, not 
passive and recipient, but vivid and productive, — 
souls that put all things into different attitudes by a 
pure act of meditation, and feel how the universe 
approaches or recedes before the changing eye of 
thought, — its constancy, nay its reality, seems purely 
relative ; it lies submissive at the feet, like storm and 
calm before the eye of Christ; the primary force of 
God's creation appears to be the free spontaneous 
soul ; whose existence is the great miracle and mys- 
tery of Heaven ; whose tendency is ever towards a 
higher life ; which communes through the screen of 
outward things with the inner mind of God, feeling 
both spirits immortal, and only the veil between con- 
demned to drop away. And just in proportion as 
the worshipper stands up before Eternity face to face, 
and feels it there, must this earth and its time- 
relations shrink beneath his feet, till he rests upon a 



THE CHRISTIAN TIME-VIEW. 



483 



point that soon will vanish. Paul, wholly absorbed in 
the immensity of existence, could by no means meas- 
ure the objects of existence by our finite rules ; the 
depth of his perspective put even distant things into 
his foreground ; and if this be chronological error, it 
comes in with the shadow of religious truth ; the de- 
lusion is scarce distinguishable from the inspiration of 
the prophet, and is even akin to the perception of God. 
No one could thus look the earthly into nothing, but 
by filling all things with the divine. 

It was not then, I conceive, the historical misappre- 
hension about the end of the world, that led to the 
belief of human immortality ; it was the intensity of 
the belief in immortality, that produced the idea of 
the approaching end of the world. This is apparent 
in a way by which you may always distinguish a 
primitive from a derivative doctrine ; the former is 
everywhere assumed, and appears as an all-perva- 
ding and unconscious faith ; the latter is frequently 
argued and expounded, and appears as an avowed 
opinion. The combination of the two, however, has 
had important effects on the development of our re- 
ligion ; and it may be doubted whether without it, 
Christendom could have taken to heart that solemn 
sense of the infinite scale of human life, which is the 
great characteristic of its theory of existence. Paul 
kept a whole generation of the church in awful and 
breathless suspense; listening for the approaching 
peal of doom, till earthly sounds fell as faint unreali- 
ties upon their ear; straining their vision aloft, as 
through a long watch-night, for the sign of the Son 
of Man in heaven ; till their footing seemed loosened 
beneath them, and the landscape sank into the dark 
away. Thus alone, I believe, could the invisible 



484 



THE CHRISTIAN TIME-VIEW. 



world be raised into the great reality to man. The 
first age of Christendom, sequestered from all else, 
and spent on its very front, obtained a divine insight 
that has not been lost. The heavenly breath that 
swept across the margin, made it felt how the heats 
of the present should be cooled, and the fever of the 
passions purified. Our poor minds can take in only 
one great conception at a time, and must be left 
alone with it for a full lifetime, if it is to be incor- 
porated with the character, and ennoble the history, 
of succeeding ages. Moreover the great religious 
faiths must be the visible basis of practical life to one 
period, ere they can be rooted in the acceptance of 
another; and had not the early Christians watched 
their hour for Christ, their fellow-disciples ever after 
would have fallen asleep in the fatigues of this 
world, deaf to the voice of its divinest sorrows, and 
missing the angels of preternatural strength. The 
superstition therefore of one age may become the 
truth and guidance of all others. 

That Christianity did really give an infinite enlarge- 
ment to the scale of human life, and that this is one 
of its great features, is conscious enough on compar- 
ing it with the religions it supplanted. It was not 
indeed that Pagan societies were without the con- 
ception of a future ; but Christianity first got it cor- 
dially believed. Even the meditative philosophy of 
Greece can present no clear instances of hearty and 
deep conviction, except in Plato and his master ; and 
whatever we may think of the rhetorical leanings of 
Cicero in the same direction, the practical earnestness 
of Rome was wholly given up, for want of higher 
thoughts, to material interests and outward magnifi- 
cence. The faint and spectral fancies of a possible 



THE CHRISTIAN TIME-VIEW. 



485 



future that floated before the mind of the people, 
scared away no crime, tranquillized no passion, disen- 
chanted no instant pleasure. They lay fevered and 
restless beneath the broad, burning orb of this imme- 
diate life, drunk with hot indulgence, and asleep to 
the midnight hemisphere of faith open to the vigils 
of the purer soul. Throughout Christendom, on the 
other hand, this boundless night-scene of existence 
has been the great object of contemplation ; has 
swallowed up the day ; has reduced the meridian 
glare of life to an exaggerated star-light, truly seen 
as such from more central positions where the appar- 
ent does not distort the real. The difference between 
the ancient and the modern world is this ; that in the 
one the great reality of being was now ; in the other, 
it is yet to come. If you would witness a scene char- 
acteristic of the popular life of old, you must go to the 
amphitheatre of Rome, mingle with its eighty thou- 
sand spectators, and watch the eager faces of Sen- 
ators and people ; observe how the masters of the 
world spend the wealth of conquest, and indulge the 
pride of power ; see every w T ild creature that God has 
made to dwell from the jungles of India to the moun- 
tains of Wales, from the forests of Germany to the 
deserts of Nubia, brought hither to be hunted down in 
artificial groves by thousands in an hour ; behold the 
captives of war, noble perhaps and wise in their own 
land, turned loose amid yells of insult more terrible 
for their foreign tongue, to contend with brutal gladi- 
ators trained to make death the favorite amusement, 
and present the most solemn of individual realities as 
a wholesale public sport ; mark the light look with 
which the multitude, by uplifted finger, demands that 

the wounded combatant be slain before their eyes ; 
41* 



486 THE CHRISTIAN TIME-TIEW. 

f 

notice the troop of Christian martyrs awaiting, hand 
in hand, the leap from the tiger's den ; and when the 
day's spectacle is over, and the blood of two thousand 
victims stains the ring, follow the giddy crowd as 
it streams from the vomitories into the street, trace 
its lazy course into the forum, and hear it there 
scrambling for the bread of private indolence doled 
out by the purse of public corruption ; and see how 
it suns itself to sleep in the open ways, or crawls 
into foul dens, til] morning brings the hope of games 
and merry blood again; — and you have an idea of 
the Imperial people, and their passionate living for 
the moment, which the gospel found in occupation of 
the world. And if you would fix in your thought an 
image of the popular mind of Christendom, I know 
not that you could do better than go at sunrise with 
the throng of toiling men to the hill-side where Whit- 
field or Wesley is about to preach. Hear what a 
great heart of reality in that hymn that swells upon 
the morning air, — a prophet's strain upon a people's 
lips ! See the rugged hands of labor clasped and 
trembling, wrestling with the Unseen in prayer! Ob- 
serve the uplifted faces, deep-lined with hardship and 
with guilt, streaming now with honest tears, and 
flushed with earnest shame, as the man of God 
awakes the life within, and tells of him that bare for 
us the stripe and the cross, and offers the holiest 
spirit to the humblest lot, and tears away the veil of 
sense from the glad and awful gates of heaven and 
hell. Go to these people's homes, and observe the 
decent tastes, the sense of domestic obligations, the 
care for childhood, the desire of instruction, the neigh- 
borly kindness, the conscientious self-respect; and 
say, whether the sacred image of duty does not live 



THE CHRISTIAN TIME-VIEW 



487 



within those minds ; whether holiness has not taken 
the place of pleasure in their idea of life; whether for 
them too the toils of nature are not lightened by some i 
eternal hope, and their burthen carried by some angel 
of love, and the strife of necessity turned into the 
service of God. The present tyrannizes over their 
character no more, subdued by a future infinitely 
great; and hardly though they lie upon the rock of 
this world, they can live the life of faith; and while / 
the hand plies the tool of earth, keep a spirit open to / 
the skies. 

There is something very ennobling to human char- 
acter in the possession of a large Time-view ; and its 
effects are visible in many cases not directly religious. 
Next to having a noble future before us, is it well to 
have a wide and worthy past. This it is that renders 
the old man venerable. His actual momentary life is 
often poor and sad enough ; the windows of sense 
and soul shut on the light and stir of the world with- 
out, and the avenues choked up through which the 
interests and passions of the hour should vibrate to 
his heart. But, while shaded from the dazzle of the 
instant, the tranquil light of half a century is spread 
beneath his eye. Many a gaudy bubble he has seen 
rise, and glitter, and burst ; many a modest good take 
secret root and grow. Every game of hope and pas- 
sion he has seen played out, and for every passage 
presented . on the living stage, can find a parallel 
scene in the old drama whose curtain never drops. 
The heroes and the wise of the past age, ideal to 
others, were real to him; his familiars are among the 
dead, dear yet to many hearts; and as he explores 
again that silent past, and climbs once more its 
consecrated heights, and loses himself in its sweet 



488 



THE CHRISTIAN TIME-VIEW. 



valleys, and rebuilds its fallen fragments, he feels 
something of an historic dignity, which sustains the 
trembling steps, and gives courage to the sorrowful 
decline. And so is it too with family recollections. 
To have had forefathers renowned for honorable 
deeds, to belong by nature to those who have bravely 
borne their part in life and refreshed the world with 
mighty thought and healthy admiration, is a privi- 
lege which it were mean and self-willed to despise. 
It is as a security given for us of old, which it were 
false-hearted not to redeem ; and in virtues bred of a 
noble stock, mellowed as they are by reverence, there 
is often a grace and ripeness, wanting to self-made 
and bran-new excellence. Of like value to a people 
are heroic national traditions, giving them a deter- 
minate character to sustain among the tribes of men, 
making them familiar with images of great and 
strenuous life, and kindling them with faith in glori- 
ous possibilities. No material interests, no common 
welfare, can so bind a community together, and 
make it strong of heart, as a history of rights main- 
tained, and virtues uncorrupted, and freedom won; 
and one legend of conscience is worth more to a 
country than hidden gold and fertile plains. It is 
but an extension of the same influence that we dis- 
cern in the Christian theory of life; only that it 
opens out our time-view alike in the future and the 
past. It makes both our lineage and our destiny 
divine; proclaims us Sons of God, and heirs. No 
tie can so fasten on us the feeling, that we belong 
not to the present, and degrade our nature whenever 
we live for the passing moment only; that we are 
not our own, but the great father, God's. Our lot is 
greater than ourselves, and gives to our souls a worth 



THE CHRISTIAN TIME-VIEW. 



489 



they would not else have dared to claim. Hence 
the humbleness there always is in Christian dignity. 
The immortal lot infinitely transcends our poor de- 
serts ; how we are to grow into the proportions of so 
high a life, it is wonderful to think. And yet though 
it be above us always, — nay, even because it is 
above us, — there is something in it true and answer- 
ing to our nature still; so that, having once lived 
with it, we are only half ourselves — and that the 
meaner half — without it. The infinite burthen of 
duty which good hearts are constrained to bear, is 
tolerable only to an immortal strength. The un- 
speakable imploring homage with which w T e look on 
truth and wisdom and greatness in other souls, is but 
sorrow and servitude, except to a spirit freed with an 
eternal love. The Christian hope gives peace and 
power by restoring the broken proportions of the 
mind ; and tranquillizes the restlessness of a spirit 
unconsciously ' cabined, cribbed, confined.' It is this 
truthfulness to our best and deepest nature, — the 
power we receive from it, the quiet we find in it, — 
that gives to the Christian estimate of life its most 
irresistible persuasion upon the heart. For my own 
part, I confess it is the only evidence that seems to 
give me true, serene, absolute faith; and when, in 
lower moods of thought, I am driven to cast about for 
a limited, intellectual ground of trust, and become a 
disciple according to argument, I sometimes doubt 
whether I do more than fancy I believe. 

With what temper then does this great faith send 
us forth to our immediate work? With the assur- 
ance that the true life is not yet; that nobler forms 
of being and affection are in reserve for faithful 
minds ; that the present derives its chief interest and 



490 



THE CHRISTIAN TIME-VIEW. 



value, not from itself, but from its relations. To live, 
in short, consists not in enjoying the day and forget- 
ting in the night; but in a waking conscience, a self- 
forgetful heart, an ungrudging hand, a thought ever 
earnest for the truth ; in a perpetual outlook of hope 
from our lower point upon an upper and infinite 
glory. We need not let the present be so eclipsed 
by the future, — we need not look upon its scenes or 
upon ourselves as so mean beneath that ulterior re- 
splendence, — that life now should be darkened by 
the contrast, instead of cheered by the connection. 
It is no sad lot of expiation that we suffer, no 
penance that our years on earth perform, purifying 
by tears and mortification, a natural disqualification 
for any higher state. On the contrary, the germs of 
the immortal growth are within us now, and will 
spring up, not by the bruising and crushing of our 
nature, but by its glorious opening out. We are 
here to try and train our faculties for great achieve- 
ments and harmonious residence within the will of 
God. Nor is the theatre unworthy of our best en- 
deavors. Only let us not, in action or in suffering, 
sink down upon the present moment, as if that were 
all. Amid the strife and sorrow that await us, let us 
remember, that the ills of life are not here on their 
own account, but are as a divine challenge and god- 
like wrestling in the night with our too reluctant 
wills ; and since, thus regarded, they are truly evil no 
more, let us embrace the conflict manfully, and fear 
no defeat to any faithful will. When all is well with 
us in this world, let us not forget that its enjoyments 
also are not here on their own account; the cup is 
not to be tossed off in careless draughts. They too 
stand in relation to the affections and character of 



THE CHRISTIAN TIME-YIEW. 



491 



soul, and thence derive their truest worth ; it were sin 
to take them to our selfish sensibilities alone; and 
they must warm us with a grateful and a generous 
mind, more trustful in the love of God, more prompt 
with a true piety for man. And when we best and 
most strenuously follow the obligations of our career, 
we can permit no flutter of self-gratulation to dis- 
turb the quiet meekness of the heart. For only look 
up on that which we dare to hope, and how are our 
mightiest achievements dwarfed. All insufficient in 
themselves, — poor spellings-out of the mere alphabet 
of eternal wisdom, — they are but signs of willing 
pupilage, — the upturned look of a disciple sitting at 
the feet. As symbols of faith and service, God will 
be graciously pleased to accept them from us ; and 
discern in them the early essays of a soul that shall 
assume at length dimensions more divine. 



XXXIX. 



THE FAMILY IN HEAVEN AND EARTH. 

Ephesians hi. 14, 15. 

our lord jesus christ, — of whom the whole family in heayen 
and earth is named. 

Jesus was never so much one with his disciples, 
as when he was no longer with them; they were 
never so widely severed from him, as when, with 
unawakened and dim-discerning heart, they lingered 
around him, with eyes so holden that they did not 
know him. The nearest in person may clearly be 
the furthest in soul ; they may eat at the same table, 
and morning and night exchange the greeting and 
the parting look, yet each remain outside the spirit of 
the other, — severed even by an impassable chasm, 
to which the earth's diameter would be less than an 
arm's length. But where the inner being, rather than 
the mere outer, has been passed together, and we 
have found in some fraternal heart the appointed 
confessional for the doubts, and strife, and sorrowful 
resolves of our existence, no amount of land or 
water can break the mutual affiliation ; the recipro- 
cation of pity and of trust, the placid memories, the 
joint courage to bear well the solemn weight of life, 
which enrich a present love, may consecrate the 
absent too. Nay, distance may even set a human 
life in truer and more affectionate aspect before us, 



THE FAMILY IN HEAVEN AND EAKTH. 493 

by stripping off its trivialities, and bringing out its 
essential features, and urging our thought to conceive 
it as a whole from its beginning to its close ; and in 
the want of any lighter union, we fold ourselves in 
the embrace of the same divine laws, and compas- 
sion for the same mortal lot. 

"With the boldness of a true and inspired nature, 
the apostle Paul gives an immeasurable extension to 
this thought; and speaks with incidental ease, of 
' one family] distributed between heaven and earth. 
There is, it seems, a domesticity that cannot be 
absorded by the interval between two spheres of 
being; — a love that cannot be lost amid the im- 
mensity, but finds the surest track across the void; — 
a home-affinity that penetrates the skies, and enters 
as the morning or the evening guest. And it is Jesus 
of Nazareth who has effected this ; — has entered 
under the same household name, and formed into 
the same class, the dwellers above and those beneath. 
Spirits there, and spirits here, are gathered by him 
into one group; and where before was saddest exile, 
he has made a blest fraternity. Let us observe in 
what instances, and by what means, the spirit of 
Christ draws into one circle the members of some 
human society, separated else by hopeless distance. 

Members of the same home cannot dwell together, 
without either the memory or the expectation of 
some mutual and mortal farewell. Families are for- 
ever forming, forever breaking up ; and every stroke 
of the pendulum carries the parting agony through 
fifty homes. There is no one of mature affections 
from whose arms some blessing of the heart, — 
parent, sister, child, — has not died away, and slip- 
ped, not as once into extinction, but (chief thanks to 
42 



494 THE FAMILY IN HEAVEN AND EARTH. 

Messiah's name) into eternity. All we who dwell in 
this visible scene can think of kindred souls that 
have vanished from us into the invisible. These, in 
the first place, does Jesus keep dwelling near our 
hearts; making still one family of those in heaven 
and those on earth. 

This he would do, if by no other means, by the 
prospect he has opened, of actual restoration. Hope- 
less grief for the dead, in being passionate, is tempted 
to be faithless too ; for, it has no remedy but in 
suffering remembrance to fade away, and employing 
the gaudy colors of the present to paint over the 
secred shadows of the past. On the other hand, the 
most distant promise of a renewed embrace is suffi- 
cient to keep alive an unforgetful love. Come where 
and when it may, after years or ages, in the nearest 
or furthest regions of God's universe, it passes across 
our minds the vision of re-union ; it opens a niche in 
the crypt of the affections, where the images of house- 
hold memory may stand, and gaze with placid look 
at the homage of our sorrow, till they light up again 
with life, and fall into our arms once more. It 
matters little at what point in the perspective of the 
future the separation enforced by death is thought to 
cease. Faith and Love are careless time-keepers; 
they have a wide and liberal eye for distance and 
duration ; and while they can whisper to each other 
the words ' Meet again,' they can watch and toil with 
wondrous patience, — with spirit fresh and true, and, 
amid its most grievous loneliness, unbereft of one 
good sympathy. And since the grave can bury no 
affections now, but only the mortal and familiar 
shape of their object; death has changed its whole 
aspect and relation to us ; and we may regard it, not 



THE FAMILY IN HEAVEN AND EARTH. 495 

with passionate hate, but with quiet reverence. It is 
a divine message from above, not an invasion from 
the abyss beneath ; not the fiendish hand of darkness 
thrust up to clutch our gladness enviously away, but 
a rainbow gleam that descends through tears, with- 
out which we should not know the various beauties 
that are woven into the pure light of life. Once let 
the Christian promise be taken to the heart; and as 
we walk through the solemn forest of our existence, 
every leaf of love that falls, while it proclaims the 
winter near, lets in another patch of God's sunshine, 
to paint the glade beneath our feet, and give £ a glory 
to the grass.' Tell me that I shall stand face to face 
with the sainted dead; and, whenever it may be, shall 
I not desire to be ready, and to meet them with clear 
eye and spirit unabashed ? Shall I not feel, that to 
forget them were the mark of a nature base and 
infidel ? — that under whatever pleasant shelter I 
may rest, and over whatever wastes I may wander 
as a wayfarer in life, I must bear their image next 
my heart; — like the exile of old, flying with his 
household gods hidden in his mantle's secret folds? 
That the Gospel leaves undetermined the period and 
place of restoration ; — that we call it 'hereafter,' and 
know not when it is; that we call it 'heaven,' and 
know not where it is; — detracts nothing from its 
power to unite into one family the living and the 
departed. It is the office of pure religious medita- 
tion to thin away the partitions of time till they 
vanish, and cast a zone around space, and enclose it 
all within the mind; to feel that whatever is certain 
must be soon, and whatever is real must be near at 
hand. And hence, it is the characteristic of Christi- 
anity to be indifferent as to the time and locality of 



496 THE FAMILY IN HEAVEN AND EAUTH. 

the events in which it excites our faith. Content 
with scattering great and transforming ideas, it allows 
every kind of misplacement in these accidental rela- 
tions ; for, if true portions of the invisible are given to 
our belief, what matters the disposition into which 
our thoughts may throw them ? Early or late, near 
or far, are alike in the eye of God, and may well be 
left open to mutable interpretation from the wants 
and affections of men. Jesus himself spake much', 
before his crucifixion, of his re-union with his dis- 
ciples. It was his favorite topic throughout that 
parting night; — the subject, now of promise, now 
of prayer; — the vision from which in that hour of 
anguish, he could never, for- many moments, bear to 
part. He leaves the impression that it would be 
very speedy ; and so thought the apostles ever after. 
And as to place, his expressions fluctuate somewhat 
between here and there; though his hearers thence- 
forth looked, and looked in vain, for him to come 
back to be with them. But of what concern was 
this? For, wkere they not ready to meet him, be 
it where it might? Did not that hope keep alive 
within their hearts the divine and gracious image of 
their Lord, and, at the end of forty years of various 
toil, still evoke it, beaming and breathing as though 
it were of yesterday ? Worlds above, and worlds 
below; — mansions are they all of the great Father's 
house; and the disciples' greeting would be equally 
blessed, whether the immortal Galilean descended to 
the embrace on this vestibule of finite things; or 
summoned them rather across its thresholds into the 
Presence-chamber of the Infinite. And no less in- 
different to our affections are the localities beyond * 
the grave. Having faith that the lost will assuredly 



THE FAMILY IN HEAVEN AND EARTH. 497 



be found, our souls detain them lovingly in the do- 
mestic circle still, and own one family in heaven and 
on earth. We may cease to ask, in which of the 
provinces of God may be the city of the dead ; a 
guide will be sent, when we are called to go. 

Such and so much encouragement would Chris- 
tianity give to the faithful conservation of all true 
affections, if it only assured us of some distant and 
undefinable restoration. But it appears to me to as- 
sure us of much more than this ; to discountenance 
the idea of any even the most temporary, extinction 
of life in the grave ; and to sanction our faith in the 
absolute immortality of the mind. Rightly under- 
stood, it teaches not only that the departed will live, 
but that they do live, and indeed have never died, but 
simply vanished and passed away. It opens to our 
view the diviner sphere of Christ's ascension, wherever 
it may be, not as a celestial solitude, where he spends 
the centuries alone; but as the ever-peopling home of 
men and nations, where predecessors waited to give 
him welcome, and disciples go to call him blessed. 
It is a great thing, thus totally to abolish the idea of 
any annihilation, however momentary, in death, and 
to reduce it to simple separation. For, it is a perilous 
and even fatal concession to the power of the grave, 
to admit that it holds anything in non-existence, 
and absolutely cancels souls ; swallowing up every 
trace of their identity, and necessitating the creation 
of another, though corresponding, series. Once let 
an object of deep love drop into that abyss and sink 
in its privative darkness, and how shall I recover it 
again? Faith stands trembling on the awful brink, 
and with vain cries and broken supplications owns 
herself unequal to the task ; for between being 1 and no 



498 THE FAMILY IN HEAVEN AND EARTH. 

being', who can fathom the infinite depth? The very 
creature that has really fallen through it, scarcely can 
Omnipotence bring back ; though it produce another 
like in every feature, giving us the phantasm and not 
the essence. But neither to God's power nor to our 
faith, does death present any serious perplexity, if it 
be only the migration of a spirit that does not cease 
to live. Thus regarded, it interposes nothing but 
physical distance between us and the objects of our 
affectionate remembrance. While we poor wayfarers 
still toil, with hot and bleeding feet, along the high- 
way and the dust of life, our companions have but 
mounted the divergent path, to explore the more 
sacred streams, and visit the diviner vales, and 
wander amid the everlasting Alps, of God's upper 
province of creation. The memorial which our hand 
affectionately raised when they departed, is no monu- 
ment to tell what once had been and is no more ; it 
is no symbol of hopeless loss ; but the landmark from 
which we measure off the miles of our solitary way, 
and reckon the definite though unknown, remnant of 
our pilgrimage ; and as the retrospect is lengthened 
out, the prospective loneliness is shortening to its 
close. And so we keep up the courage of our hearts, 
and refresh ourselves with the memories of love, and 
travel forward in the ways of duty with less weary 
step, feeling ever for the hand of God, and listening 
for the domestic voices of the immortals whose happy 
welcome waits us. Death, in short, under the Chris- 
tian aspect, is but God's method of colonization ; 
the transition from this mother-country of our race 
to the fairer and newer world of our emigration. 
What though no other passage thither is permitted 
to all the living, and by neither eye nor ear we can 



THE FAMILY IN HEAVEN AND EARTH. 499 

discover any trace of that unknown receptacle of 
■vivid and more glorious life ? So might the dwellers 
in any other sphere make complaint respecting our 
poor world. Intensely as it burns with life, dizzy 
as our thought becomes with the din of its eager 
passions, and the cries of its many woes, yet from 
the nearest station that God's universe affords, — nay, 
at a few miles beyond its own confines, — all its 
stormy force, its crowded cities, the breathless hurry 
and ferment of its nations, — the whole apparition 
and chorus of humanity, is still and motionless as 
death ; gathered all and lost within the circum- 
ference of a dark or illumined disk. And silent as 
those midnight heavens appear, well may there be, 
among their points of light, some one that thrills 
with the glow of our lost and immortal generations ; 
busy with the fleet movements, and happy energies, 
of existence more vivid than our own ; where as we 
approach, we might catch the awful voices of the 
mighty dead, and the sweeter tones, lately heard in 
the last pain and sorrow, of our own departed ones. 

But it is not merely the members of the same 
literal home that Christ unites in one, whether in 
earth or heaven. He makes the good of every age 
into a glorious family of the children of God ; and 
inspires them with a fellow-feeling, whatever the de- 
partment of service which they fill. Disci pleship to 
Christ is not like the partisanship of the schools, — 
an exclusive devotion to partial truth, an exaggera- 
tion of some single phase of human life. Keeping 
us ever in the mental presence of the divinest wis- 
dom and in veneration of a perfect goodness, it 
accustoms us to the aspect of every grace that can 
adorn and consecrate our nature ; trains our percep- 



500 THE FAMILY IN HEAVEN AND EARTH. 

tions instantly to recognize its influence or to feel its 
want. It looks with an eye of full and clear affection 
over the wide circle of human excellence. Had we 
not been the followers of One, whose thoughts were 
often deep and mystic, showing how simplicity 
touches upon wonder, and wonder elevates sim- 
plicity ; we might have overlooked the high problems 
of our life, and held in light esteem the souls agitated 
by their grandeur, perhaps lost in their profundity. 
Had we not sat at the feet of One, before whose 
gentle tones and patient looks the shrinking child 
and repentant woman might feel it a safe and heal- 
ing thing to stand, we might have despised that faith 
of love which in being feminine, does not cease to 
be manly, and have allowed no recess of honor in 
our hearts to the apostles of meekness and mercy. 
Had we not heard from a Master's lips, the blight- 
ing severities before which Pharisees and hypocrites 
flinched and stood aghast, we might have softened 
unworthily the austere claims of truth and justice, 
have lost the healthy horror at sin, and refused our 
thanksgiving to the patriots and prophets, whose 
flashing zeal has purified the atmosphere of this 
world. And were it not for the words so infinitely 
graceful, and prayers of deepest aspiration, that fell 
from Messiah's lips, the very soul of Christendom 
would have been steeped in colors far less fair ; 
we might never have felt how soon the kindred 
fountains of sanctity and beauty blend together; 
and have denied to the poet, as the priest of nature, 
his fit alliance with the priest of faith. But thrown 
as we are into reverence for no disproportioned and 
unfinished soul, we cannot contract a catholic sym- 
pathy for every noble form assumed by our human- 



THE FAMILY IN HEAVEN AND EARTH. 501 



ity. Philosophy and art, the statesman and the bard, 
the reformer and the saint, all take their place before 
us in the Providential sphere, and in proportion as 
they are faithful to their trust, draw from us an admir- 
ing recognition. We see in them selections from the 
exhaustless inspiration of the infinite wisdom ; streaks 
of divine illumination, rushing in through the cloud- 
openings of our world. No genuine disciple can be 
sceptical as to the existence, or fastidious as to the 
acknowledgment, of any true worthiness. We owe 
it largely to the author of our faith, that we cannot 
encounter the great and good in the generations of 
the past, without affectionate curiosity, and even 
strong friendship. Christ, himself the discerner of the 
Samaritan's goodness and the alien's faith, has called 
the noble dead of history to a better life than they 
had before, even in this world; their memory is 
dearer ; their example more productive ; their spirit 
more profoundly understood. Thus there is a]frater- 
nity formed that disowns the restrictions of place and 
time ; a Church of Christ that passes the bounds of 
Christendom ; and though in the general chorus of 
great souls, disciples only can well apprehend the 
theme and put in the Words, yet the glorious voices 
of Socrates and Plato, of Alcseus and Pindar, of Aris- 
tides and Scipio, of Antoninus and Boethius, richly 
mingle as preluding or supporting instruments, filling 
the melody, though scarce interpreting the thought. 
Nor is this brotherhood confined even by historic 
bounds ; it spreads beyond this sphere and makes one 
family in heaven and earth. The very faith that the 
honored men of old still live, and carry on elsewhere 
the appointed work of faithful minds, unspeakably 
deepens our interest in them ; forbids us to sigh 



502 



THE FAMILY IN HEAVEN AND EARTH. 



after them as irrecoverable images of the past ; enrolls 
them among our contemporaries ; and from the lights 
of memory transfers them to the glories of hope. If 
Pascal's ' thoughts ' are not half published yet, but 
are pondering for the secr*ets of sublimer themes ; if 
Shakspeare's genial eye is withdrawn from the stage of 
life only that it may read the drama of the universe ; if 
Paul, having testified for what a Christ he lived, shall 
yet tell us for what a gain he died ; if Isaiah's harp is 
not really silent, but may fill us soon with the glow 
of a diviner fire; — with what solemn heart, what 
reverential hand, shall we open the temporary page 
by which, meanwhile, they speak with us from the 
past! Such hope tends to give us a prompt and 
large congeniality with them ; to cherish the health- 
ful affections which are domestic in every place and 
obsolete in no time ; to prepare us for entering any 
new scene, and joining any new society where good- 
ness, truth and beauty dwell. 

Even this wide friendship need not entirely close 
the circle of our fraternity. Beyond the company of 
the great and good, a vast and various crowd is 
scattered round ; no line must be drawn which they 
are forbid to pass; some srJan of sympathy must 
embrace them too. No proud mysteries, no secret 
initiation, guard the entrance to the Christian brother- 
hood ; even wandering guilt must be sought for and 
brought home; and penitence that sits upon the 
steps must be asked to come within the door. Christ 
will not remain at the head of the 'whole family,' if 
its forlorn and outcast members are simply put away 
in selfish shame, and no gentle care is spent to 
smooth the pathway of return. He gives to some a 
present joy in one another; he denies to none a hope 



THE FAMILY IN HEAVEN AND EARTH. 503 

for all. The alliance of our hearts is itself founded 
on the kindred in our being; and is but the actual 
result of affections not impossible to any. The 
affinities of nature lie deeper than the sympathies of 
taste ; and should be accepted as guarantees for the 
equal tenderness of God, amid the alienations of our 
foolish passions. And whoever will take to heart, 
how the same human burthen is laid on all, and the 
divine relief so nobly used by some is for awhile so 
sadly missed by more ; how much resemblance lurks 
under every difference between man and man ; how 
small a space may often separate the decline into 
grievous failure, and the ascent into glorious success ; 
must surely feel the yearnings of a fraternal heart 
towards all who have borne the earthly mission; must 
look on the apparition and disappearance of genera- 
tion after generation on this scene with an almost 
domestic regret and household pity for his kind; con- 
soled and elevated by the trust, that men and nations 
who have performed the parts of shame and sorrow 
here, are trained to nobler and more natural offices 
elsewhere. 



XL. 



THE SINGLE AND THE EVIL EYE. 

Matthew vi. 22, 23. 

the light of the body is the eye; if therefore thine eye 
be single, thy whole body shall be full of light ; but if 
thine eye be eyil, thy whole body shall be full of dark- 
ness, if therefore the light that is in thee be darkness, 
how great is that darkness ! 

Great, indeed ! because it not only hides realities, 
but produces all kinds of deceptive unrealities ; to the 
blinding character of all darkness, adding the creative 
activity of light; suppressing the clear outline and 
benign face of things, and throwing up instead their 
twisted and malignant shadows. This is the differ- 
ence, so awfully indicated by the greatest of Seers in 
the words just cited, between the evil eye and no eye 
at all. The latter only misses what there is ; the 
former surrounds itself by what is not. The one is 
an innocent privation, that makes no pretence to 
knowledge of the light; the other is a guilty delusion, 
proud of its powers of vision, and applying its blind 
organ to every telescope with an air of superior 
illumination. The one is the eye simply closed in 
sleep ; the other, staring with nightmare and burning 
with dreams; whose train the gloom of midnight 
does not relieve, and whose trooping images the 



THE SINGLE AND THE EVIL EYE. 



505 



dawning light does not disperse. He whose very 
light has become darkness, treats the privative as 
positive and the positive as privative; he sees the 
single, double, and the double, single ; with him 
nothing is infinite, and the infinite is nothing. The 
great prism of truth is painted backward, and the 
rainbow of promised good is upside down ; and while 
he cannot espy the angel standing in the sun, he can 
read the smallest print by the pit-lights of Tophet, that 
threaten to blind the spirits, and smoke out the stars. 
To the evil eye the universe is not simply hidden but 
reversed. 

This will not appear strange to any one who con- 
siders that two things are requisite for perception of 
any sort ; viz., an object, and an instrument, of per- 
ception ; — an outward thing, and an inward faculty. 
Sunshine is of no use in an eyeless world; and the 
most sensitive retina is wasted in the dark. The 
impressions we receive are the result of a relation 
between the scene by which we are environed, and 
the mind with which we survey it ; take away either 
term of this relation, and the other disappears. In 
like manner, alter the character of either term, and 
the relation ceases to be the same. The sweet may 
become bitter, not only by chemical changes in the 
substance, but by the sick palate of the taster. And 
if it were the Creator's will to paint afresh the 
spectacle of his works visible from this earth, and 
make the heavens green and the grass like fire, he 
might work the miracle, either by revising the lawsx 
of light and color, or by fitting up our visual power 
anew, and tinging its glass with different shades. 
Nor could we ever, in such case, tell which it was ; 
our consciousness commencing with the effect and 
43 



506 



THE SINGLE AND THE ETIL EYE. 



not reaching back to the cause. Just as it would, if 
all our measures of time were to be simultaneously 
accelerated to a double speed. Under such condi- 
tions, an apparent revolution would take place in the 
duration of all phenomena. It would seem, that 
human life had resumed its patriarchal length, and all 
recent history would appear as through a diminish- 
ing medium. Nor indeed is it any idle fancy that 
such changes are possible. We even feel the warn- 
ing touch of them day by day; and their faint breath, 
like a passing chill trespassing from the invisible, 
sweeps by and leaves an awe on thoughtful hearts. 
If self-forgetful activity, or the lively commerce of 
mind with mind, can dwindle hours into minutes, 
while a dull and heavy sorrow may protract a night 
into an age ; if the dream of a few instants can com- 
prise the history of years ; — how evident is it that 
our apparent time, which is our real life, stretches or 
shrinks with the variable moods of the mind ; that 
not only does the way we go become as the moist 
meadow or the parched desert, according as we 
gaze through the cool lens of a pure health, or the 
throbbing eye of fever, but by the quicker or slower 
pace of thought, we may be made to fly across the 
soft grass of our refreshment, or crawl over the hot 
sands of our torture; that, by only such shifting 
of our time-measures as occurs in each night's sleep, 
a thousand years might become to us also as one 
day, or one day as a thousand years; that thus the 
smallest element of joy or woe might be multiplied 
into infinite value, and a heaven or hell be construct-' 
ed from the feeling dropped by a moment's passing 
wing! Here, at least, the veil of tender mercy be- 
comes transparent, which alone screens us from a lot 
more terrible than death. 



THE SINGLE AND THE EVIL EYE. 



507 



So far, however, as our views of things are deter- 
mined by the endowments conceded to our nature, we 
accept them with a calm content. We know, indeed, 
that God might have made us otherwise, and so have 
set quite a different universe before us ; nor have we 
the smallest power of comparing that possible system 
of phenomena with this actual, so as to demonstrate 
which of them may best agree with the truth of 
things. This is a matter which, like all the founda- 
tions of our being, must rest on faith ; it is one of our 
very roots, which we cannot manufacture for our- 
selves in the dry light ; — which we cannot even 
scrape up to look up at how it lives; — but which in- 
sits on growing down into the darkness, and spread- 
ing its fibres through the subsoil of nature. It is plain, 
that if our faculties were in themselves incapable and 
deceptive; or if they were hopelessly vitiated by 
secret and resistless causes, — there would be no help 
for us. We could no more lift ourselves above our 
illusions and perversions, than the ape could raise 
himself into a man, or the man into an angel. We 
cannot issue from ourselves, and alight upon a sta- 
tion outside our own nature; that nature is with us 
when we judge it, and does but pass sentence on 
itself. We cannot think of the laws of thought, but 
by remaining within them; or estimate what we 
know, except as an element of knowledge. However 
often the drop may turn itself inside out, and circu- 
late its particles from centre to surface, and from pole 
to pole, it remains the same constant sphere, reflect- 
ing the same vault that hangs over it, and yielding 
to the same attractions stirring within it. And while 
there would be no help for such human incapacity, 
there would be no consciousness of it. To be con- 



508 



THE SINGLE AND THE EVIL EYE. 



scious of it would be to escape it, — to have a rule 
of judgment exempted from its operation; for he 
who sees that he has missed the truth, misses it no 
more. Faith therefore in our own faculties, as God 
has given them, is at the very basis of all knowledge 
and belief, on things human or divine ; — an act of 
primitive religion, so inevitable that without it scep- 
ticism itself cannot even begin, but wanders about 
through the inane, in fruitless search for a point on 
which to hang its first sophistic thread. And each 
one of our natural powers is to be implicitly trusted 
within its own sphere, and not beyond it; the senses, 
as reporters of the outward world ; the understanding, 
in the ascertainment of laws and the interpretation 
of nature; the reason and conscience, in the ordering 
of life, the discernment of God, and the following of 
religion. Whoever tries to shake their authority, as 
the ultimate appeal in their several concerns, though 
he may think himself a saint, is in fact an infidel. 
Whoever pretends that anything can be above them, 
— be it a book or a church, — is secretly cutting up 
all belief by the roots. Whoever tells me that pro- 
phet or apostle set himself above them, and contra- 
dicted, instead of reverently interpreting and rendering 
audible, the whispers of the highest soul, is charge- 
able with fixing on the messengers of God the sure 
sign of imposture or of wildness. To tell me, with 
warnings against my erring faculties, that a thing is 
divine which offends my devoutest preception of the 
true and holy ; — as well might you persuade me to 
admire the sweetness of a discord by abusing my 
sense of hearing, or to prefer a sign-board to a Raf- 
faelle by enumerating optical illusions and preaching 
on the imperfections of sight. Amid the clamor of 



THE SINGLE AND THE EVIL EYE. 509 

dissonant theologies, let us sit then, with a com- 
posed love, at the feet of him who pointed to the 
way, — which no doubt can darken and no knowledge 
close, — of seeing God through purity of heart. That 
clear and single eye, filling the soul with light ; what 
is it but the open thought and conscience by which 
the truth of heaven streams in ? And does not Jesus 
appeal to this as our only rescue from utter darkness 
and spiritual eclipse? If so, then men can see for 
themselves in things divine. They are not required to 
take on trust a rule of life and faith, in which they 
would discern no authority and feel no confidence, 
were it not for the seal it professes to carry, and the 
affidavit with which it is superscribed. A system, 
indeed, befriended on the mere strength of its letters 
of recommendation misses everything divine. A rule 
which cannot authorize itself is no rule of duty, no 
source of obligation ; but, at best, only a maxim of 
policy and instructions of self-interest. Till it touches 
us with its internal sanctity and excellence, and we 
can no longer neglect it without shame and remorse 
as well as fear, our adoption of it is not moral, but 
mimetic; we imitate the things which may be duty 
to persons who have a conscience, but which are no 
duty to us. If Christ alone had personal and first- 
hand discernment of the truth and authority of 
Christianity, and all other men have to take it solely 
on his word, then Christianity wholly ceases to be a 
Religion, and the compliance with it becomes a mere 
simial observance of the movements of a great pos- 
ture-master of the soul. It is as if God had sent one 
solitary being gifted with eye-sight into a world of 
the blind, to teach them to act as though they could 
see ; groping about in dark places, and shading their 
43* 



510 THE SINGLE AND THE EYIL EYE. 

faces in a blaze; in which case, the actions, proceed- 
ing from no vision, would have no meaning, and, 
though displaying docility, would border on foolish- 
ness and hypocrisy. Turn the matter as we may, it 
will appear that the fullest, most unqualified admis- 
sion of a moral and rational nature in man, whose 
decisions no external power can overrule, and which 
constitutes God's ever open court for trying the 
claims of scripture and prophecy, no less than of 
philosophy, is the prime requisite of all devout faith ; 
without which, duty loses its sacredness, revelation 
its significance, and God himself his authority. 

Though, however, our first act of faith must be 
an implicit trust in the powers, through which alone 
divine things are apprehensible by us, it must be a 
trust in the intrinsic nature which God has given 
them, not in the actual state to which we may have 
reduced them. They are liable to the same law as 
the inferior endowments which connect us with ma- 
terial things ; attaining clearness and precision with 
faithful use; vitiated and discolored by abuse; be- 
numbed and confused by disuse. The eye that had 
been long- closed in privation, opened at first with so 
little discernment as to see f men like trees, walking.' 
And the soul shut up from earnest meditation, and 
drowsy amid the heavenly light to which it should 
direct its patient gaze, is likely to see God, like Fate, 
sleeping; or like a ghost, unreal; or like the master- 
builder, retreating from the ship he has launched 
upon the waves ; or like the spectrum of the sun, a 
patch of darkness perforating the heavens, where 
once looked forth a glorious orb, ' of this great world 
both eye and soul.' Surely it is a truth of personal 
experience, that our views of God, of the life we live, 



THE SINGLE AND THE EVIL EYE. 



511 



of the world we occupy, materially change according 
to the caprices of our own mind. When the spirits 
are sinking, and the press of the world arises in its 
strength; when the will trembles and faints beneath 
its load, and the hours seem to dash exulting by and 
leave us at a cruel distance; when the presence of 
more energetic and devoted souls fills us with a sor- 
rowing reverence, and humbles us to the dust with self- 
reproach ; when the silent shadow of lost opportunity 
sits cold upon us, and the memory of misspent 
moments drips upon the sad heart, like rain-drops 
from the wintry boughs; — then, no peace of God, 
no tranquil order of life, no free and open affection, 
seems possible again; the bow of hope has fled from 
heaven, and the green sod of the earth is elastic to 
our feet no more; the very universe seems stricken 
with a rod of disappointment that has turned it into 
lead ; and Providence either vanishes utterly from our 
view, or appears to us as a hard task-master, that 
lashes a jaded strength, and lays on us a burthen 
greater than we can bear. At other times, when 
perhaps some affliction cast us down, or some call of 
arduous duty startles us, we have clearness enough 
left to pray with a mighty and uplifted heart. God 
seems to behold the silence of our surrender, and 
snatches us up into the infinite deliverance. The 
soul retreats within, and sees his light; it spreads 
without, and feels his power. We can put our heel 
on toil and fear, and move over them with the spring 
of resolution. A glory spreads over the clouds of 
sorrow, that makes them majestic as the serene and 
open sky ; they hang over us as a canopy of heavenly 
fire, the hiding-place of a thunder that terrifies us not; 
or as the piled mountains of a sublimer world, in 



512 



THE SINGLE AND THE EVIL EYE. 



whose awful valleys we would abide, though threat- 
ened by the roar of the avalanche, and the advancing 
glacier of inevitable death. The things so huge to 
the microscopic eye of care retreat into infinite little- 
ness before the sweep of a more comprehensive vision. 
Whole floods of trouble, peopled with terrors, be- 
come as dew-drops on the grass; and the very earth 
itself, with its crowd of struggling interests, appears 
as a calm orb floating in the deeps of heaven. Mo- 
ments like these occur in the history of all tried and 
faithful minds; and comprise within them a larger 
portion of existence than years of the eating, drink- 
ing and sleeping, the bargaining and book-keeping, 
which men call life. They are the beacons and land- 
marks of our spiritual way, alone remaining visible 
over long reaches of our career. Nor do they 
stand alone, to show how our own mood affects, for 
better or worse, the views we take of things above 
us. Let a man go suddenly from the meal of luxury 
to the death-bed of selfishness, where no love lingers, 
and tears only pretend to flow ; let him pass from the 
sense of animal enjoyment to the spectacle of animal 
extinction; — and he will inevitably believe in annihi- 
lation. The saintly words of everlasting hope will 
be as a strange jargon in his ears ; the death-rattle on 
the bed will put out all the silent possibilities of 
eternity; he will shake off the remembrance of them 
as the remnants of a troubled dream; .and return, 
with a shrug, to the table of his enjoyment, to 'eat 
and drink, since to-morrow he dies.' But only let 
the heart beat with love, and the eye look upon the 
scene through the perspective of an infinite "sorrow; 
let it be the child catching the last accents of a 
parent venerated for richness of wisdom and great- 



THE SINGLE AND THE EVIL EYE. 



513 



ness of life; or the parents, resigning the child whose 
infancy is the most graceful picture in their memory, 
to whose opening wonder they have held the guid- 
ing hand, whose expanding reason they have sought 
to fill with order and with light, whose deepen- 
ing earnestness of duty and trust of pure affection 
has revived their fainting will, and refreshed them 
with a thankful mind ; and do you think that any 
doubt will linger there? Do you suppose that that 
father or that child will be buried in the earth or sea? 

— can be hidden from the eyes by mountains of dust, 
or the waves of any unfathomable ocean? Ah no! 
All matter becomes transparent to inextinguishable 
light like this ; and soil, and air, and water, and time, 
and the realm of death, must let this lamb of God 
shine through; and we follow it as it recedes in the 
holy darkness ; till we too await the divine hand, and 
hope, with that help, to overtake it once again. Nay, 
can any one deny, that it is often possible to fore- 
know a man's moral and religious faith, by mere 
acquaintance with the general temper of his mind? 

— that even his outward professions themselves go 
for little with us, if they are violently at variance 
with this natural expectation ? It is useless to tell 
me, of a libertine and Epicurean, that he believes in 
the Divine Rule, and is a devout worshipper at 
church. I know him to be an atheist by a surer 
mark than words and postures, — by a necessity of 
corrupted nature, which can only be reversed by a 
renovated life. Nor need you try to persuade me that 
a soul pure, tender, merciful, has any real faith in a 
relentless Hell, where the cry of penitence can avail 
no more. Such things may stand written in creeds 
which those gentle lips may still repeat ; but let the 



514 



THE SINGLE AND THE EVIL EYE. 



heretic friend or son die away from her arms, and 
she will find some divine excuse for keeping the tor- 
ment far away. The eye of love is too clear and 
single, to allow of the light that is in it becoming so 
dread a darkness as that impossible faith. 

Such then as the man is, such is his belief; and the 
faith to which he bears his testimony, testifies in 
return of him. He sees such things as his soul is 
qualified to show him ; nor can he describe the pros- 
pect before him without betraying the direction to 
which his window turns. Let it not be supposed that 
truth and falsehood are thus rendered arbitrary and 
precariously distinguished ; that, as there is a differ- 
ent interpretation of life and discernment of God for 
every temper of the mind, all are probable alike, and 
none deserving of our trust. It would be so, if we 
were always imprisoned in the same temper, and 
unable to compare it with another; or if, on the 
admission of such comparison, we could perceive no 
ground of difference, no reason of preference. But 
we are ever passing from mood to mood of thought; 
and it is not hidden from us which are sound and 
worthy, which are corrupt and mean. We know our 
shameful from our noble hours; and we cannot 
honestly pretend to confide in the insinuations of the 
one, as we do in the inspirations of the other. Who 
can affect unconsciousness of the times, when the 
climate of his soul is dull and stagnant, and thick 
with fog; and when it is clear and fresh, and eager to 
transmit the light ? Who can presume to compare 
the murky doubts and damp short-sightedness of 
the one, with the sunny outlook and far horizon of 
the other; or ask, in good faith, 'How do I know 
which of these views is true ? ' So long as the cloud 



THE SINGLE AND THE EVIL EYE. 



515 



does not fixedly close upon the heart, but light enough 
darts in to show us the intermediate darkness, excuse 
is shut out, and hope remains. The slightest open- 
ing left may be enlarged ; Heaven will look in, and 
may melt the margin as it passes through. Whoever 
will reverence the glimpses of his better mind shall 
find them multiplied ; and even whilst they pass, they 
may be rich in revelations. Faithfully used, the 
momentary transit may expound an everlasting truth ; 
and by predicting, may procure, the recurrence of like 
happy instants. Ashamed of no pure love, distrust- 
ful of no worthy aspiration, forgetful of no clear 
insight once granted to the soul, we shall find the 
weight of gloom and fear fast break away, and 
beneath the open hemisphere of faith bend in the 
worship of joy, and say, 1 Thou art light, and in thee 
is no darkness at all.' 



XLI. 



THE SEVEN SLEEPEKS. 

Isaiah xlvi. 9, 10. 

remember the former things of old i for i am god, and there 
is none else ; i am god, and there is none like me ; declaring 
the end from the beginning, and from ancient times the 
things that are not yet done ; saying, my counsel shall 

STAND. 

The fictions of popular piety are usually incon- 
stant and local. But there is a legend of the early 
Christianity, whose ready acceptance, within a few 
years of its origin, is not less remarkable than its wide 
diffusion through every country from the Ganges to 
the Thames ; — a legion which has spread over 
West and East from the centres of Rome and By- 
zantium ; which you may hear in Russia or in 
Abyssinia; and which having seized on the ardent 
fancy of Mohammed, is found in the Koran, and is as 
familiar to the Arab and the Moor, as to the Spaniard 
and the Greek. 

In the middle of the fifth century, the resident pro- 
prietor of an estate near Ephesus was in want of 
building-stone to raise some cottages and granaries 
on his farm. His fields sloped up the side of a moun- 
tain, in which he directed his slaves to open a quarry. 
In obeying his orders they found a spacious cavern, 
whose mouth was blocked up with masses of rock 



THE SEVEN SLEEPERS. 



517 



artificially piled. On removing these, they" were 
startled by a dog suddenly leaping from the interior. 
Venturing further in, to a spot on which the sunshine, 
no longer excluded, directly fell, they discovered, just 
turning as from sleep, and dazzled with the light, 
seven young men of dress and aspect so strange, that 
the slaves were terrified and fled. The slumberers, on 
rising, found themselves ready for a meal ; and, the 
cave being open, one of them set out for the city to 
buy food. On his way through the familiar country 
(for he was a native of Ephesus), a thousand surprises 
struck him. The road over which yesterday's per- 
secution had driven him was turned ; the landmarks 
seemed shifted, and gave a twisted pattern to the 
fields ; on the green meadow of the Cayster had 
sprung up a circus and a mill. Two soldiers were 
seen approaching in the distance ; hiding himself till 
they were past, lest they should be emissaries of im- 
perial intolerance, he observed that the accoutrements 
were fantastic, the emblems of Decius were not there, 
the words that dropped from their talk were in a 
strange dialect, and their friendly company was a 
Christian presbyter. From a rising ground, he looked 
down the river to the base of Diana's hill ; and lo ! 
the great temple, — the world-wide wonder, — was 
nowhere to be seen. Arrived at the city, he found its 
grand gate surmounted by a cross. In the streets, 
rolling with new-shaped vehicles filled with theatrical 
looking people, the very noises seemed to make a 
foreign hum. He couldl suppose himself in a city of 
dreams ; only that here and there appeared a house, 
all whose rooms within he certainly knew ; with an 
aspect, however, among the rest, curiously dull and 
dwindled, as in a new window looks an old pane, 
44 



518 



THE SEVEN SLEEPERS. 



preserved for some line scratched by poet or by sage. 
Before his errand is quite forgot, he enters a bread- 
shop to make his purchase ; offers the silver coin of 
Decius in payment ; when the baker, whose astonish- 
ment was really manifest, enough, can restrain his 
suspicions no longer ; but arrests his customer as the 
owner of unlawful treasure, and hurries him before 
the city court. There he tells his tale ; that with his 
Christian companions he had taken refuge in the 
cave from the horrors of the Decian persecution ; 
had been pursued thither, and built in for a cruel 
death ; had fallen asleep till wakened by the return- 
ing sun, let in again by some friendly and unhoped 
for hand; and crept back into the town to procure 
support for life in their retreat. And there too, in 
reply, he hears a part of the history which he cannot 
tell ; that Decius had been dethroned by death nearly 
two centuries ago, and paganism by the Truth full 
one ; that, while heaven had wrapped him in myste- 
rious sleep, the earth's face, in its features physical 
and moral, had been changed ; that empire had 
shifted its seat from the Tiber to the Bosphorus ; 
that the Temple had yielded to the Church ; the 
demons of mythology to the saints and martyrs of 
Christendom ; and that he who had quitted the city 
in the third century returned to it in the fifth, and 
stood under the Christian protection of the second 
Theodosius. It is added, that the Ephesian clergy 
and their people were conducted by the confessor to 
the cave, exchanging wonders as they conversed by 
the way ; and that the seven sleepers, having attested 
in their persons the preserving hand of God, and re- 
told the story of their life, and heard snatches of the 
news of nearly two hundred years, gave their parting 



THE SEVEN SLEEPERS. 



519 



blessing to the multitude, and sank in the silence 
of natural death. 

For the' purpose of mental experiment, fable is as 
good as fact. To reveal our nature to itself, it is 
often more effectual for the imagination to go out 
upon a fiction, than for the memory to absorb a 
chronicle. When the citizens and the sleepers met, 
each was awe-struck at the other ; yet no one had 
been conscious of anything awful in himself. The 
youths, startled by the police of Paganism, had risen 
up from dinner, leaving their wine untasted ; and on 
arriving breathless at their retreat, laid themselves 
down, dusty, weary, ordinary creatures enough. They 
resume the thread of being where it hung suspended ; 
and are greeted everywhere with the uplifted hands, 
and shrinking touch of devout amazement. And the 
busy Ephesians had dressed themselves that morning, 
and swept their shops, and run down to the office and 
the dock, with no idea that they were not the most 
commonplace of mortals, pushing through a toilsome 
and sultry career. They are stopped mid-day to be 
assured, that their familiar life is an incredible ro- 
mance, that their city is steeped in visionary tints, 
and they themselves are as moving apparitions. And 
they are told this, when they cannot laugh at it, or 
brush it, like Sunday memories, away. For who are 
they that say such things, gazing into them with full 
deep eyes? Counterparts in their looks of all the 
marvels they profess to see ; — proofs that the old, 
dead times were once alive, warm with young pas- 
sions, noble with young faith ; astir with limbs that 
could be weary, and hiding sorrows whose sob and 
cry might be overheard. Would not the men, return- 
ing to their homes be conscious of understanding life 



520 



THE SEVEN SLEEPEKS. 



anew ? Would they not look down upon their chil- 
dren, and up at the portraits of their ancestors, 
with a perception from which a cloud had cleared 
away ? Would the fashion of the drawing-room, the 
convention of the club, the gossip of the exchange, 
retain all their absorbing interest ; and the wrestlings 
of doubt and duty, the sighs of reason, the conflicts 
of affection, the nearness of God, spoken of by 
prophets in the trance of inspiration, and the church 
in its prayer of faith, appear any more as idle words ? 
No ; the revelation of a reality in the Past, would 
produce the feeling of a reality in the Present. Many 
invisible things would shape themselves forth, as with 
a solid surface, reflecting the heavenly light, and 
sleeping in the colors of pure truth; many visible 
things would melt in films away, and retreat like 
the escaping vista of a dream. When the people's 
anthem went up on the Sabbath morning, ' O God of 
our fathers ! ' that grave, historic cry would not seem 
to set his spirit far, but to bring it overhanging 
through the very spaces of the dome above. When 
the holy martyrs were named with the glory of an 
affectionate praise, their silent forms would seem to 
group themselves meekly round. And when the 
upper life of saints and sages, — of suffering taken 
in its patience and goodness in its prime, of the faith- 
ful parent and the Christ-like child, was mentioned 
with a modest hope, it would appear no fabled island, 
for which the eye might stretch across the sea in vain, 
but a visible range of everlasting hills, whose outline 
of awful beauty is already steadfast above the deep. 

Now whence would spring an influence like this ? 
what source must we assign to the power which such 
incident would have exerted over its witnesses ? The 



THE SEVEN SLEEPERS. 



521 



essence of it is simply this; the Past stood up in the 
face of the Present, and spake with it; and they 
found each other out; and each learned that he be- 
held the other with true eye, and himself with false. 
The lesson is not set beyond our reach. No miracle 
indeed is sent to teach it ; no grotesque extracts from 
bygone centuries walk about among us. But our 
ties with other days are not broken; fragments of 
them stand around us ; notices of them lie before us. 
The recesses of time are not hopelessly dark ; opened 
by the hand of labor, and penetrated by the light of 
reason, their sleeping forms will rise and re-enter our 
living world, and in showing us what they have been, 
disclose to us what we are. The legendary youths 
are but the impersonations of history; and their visit 
to the Ephesians, but a parable of the relation be- 
tween historical perception and religious faith. 

The great end, yet the great difficulty, of religion 
is, so to analyze our existence for us, as to distinguish 
its essential spirit from its casual forms, the real from 
the apparent, the transient from the eternal. Experi- 
ence mixes them all up together, and arranges noth- 
ing according to its worth. The dress that clothes 
the body, and the body that clothes the soul, appear 
in such invariable conjunction, and become so much 
the signs of one another, that all run into one object, 
and tempt us to exaggerate the trivial and depreciate 
the great. That which a man has, and that which 
he is, move about together, and live in the same 
house ; till our fancy and our faith grow too indolent 
to separate them ; we fasten him to his possessions, 
and when they are dropped in death, think that he is 
gone to nought. It is the business of faith to see all 
things in their intrinsic value ; it is the work of ex- 
44* 



522 



THE SEVEN SLEEPERS. 



perience to thrust them on us in accidental combina- 
tions; and hence the flattening, sceptical, blinding 
influence of a passive and unresisted experience. 
Hence it is that time is apt to take away a truth for 
each one that he gives, and rather to change our wis- 
dom than to increase it ; and while foresight assured- 
ly comes to man, insight will often tarry with the 
child. When the eye first looks on life, it is not to 
study its successions, but to rest upon its picture ; its 
loveliness is discerned before its order; its aspect is 
interpreted, while its policy is quite unknown. Our 
early years gaze on all things through the natural 
glass of beauty and affection, which in religion is the 
instrument of truth. But soon it gets dimmed by the 
breath of usage, which adheres to all except natures 
the most pure and fine; and a cold cloud darkens 
the whole universe before us. Day by day, the un- 
derstanding sees more, the imagination less, in the 
scene around us; till it seems all made up of soil to 
grow our bread, and clay to build our house ; and we 
become impatient, if any one pretends to find in it 
the depth which its atmosphere has lost to us, and 
the grandeur which has faded from our view. We 
dwell in this world, like dull serfs in an Alpine land; 
who are attached indeed to their home with the 
strong instincts of men cut off from much intercourse 
with their kind, and whose passions, wanting diffu- 
sion, acquire a local intensity; who therefore sigh in 
absence for their mountains, as the Arab for his desert ; 
but in whom there is no sense of the glories amid 
which they live ; who wonder what the traveller 
comes to see; w T ho in the valleys closed by the gla- 
cier, and echoing with the torrent, observe only the 
timber for their fuel, and the paddock for their kine. 



THE SEVEN SLEEPERS. 



523 



We are often the last to see how noble are our oppor- 
tunities, to feel how inspiring the voices that call us 
to high duties and productive sacrifice ; and while we 
loiter on in the track of drowsy habit, esteeming our 
lot common and profane, better hearts are looking on, 
burning within them to stand on the spot where we 
stand, to seize its hopes, and be true to all its sacred- 
ness. It is an abuse of the blessings of experience, 
when it thus stupefies us with its benumbing touch, 
and in teaching us a human lesson, persuades us to 
unlearn a divine. The great use of custom is to 
teach us what to expect, to familiarize us with the 
order of events from day to day, that we may com- 
pute our way aright, and know how to rule whatever 
lies beneath our hand. This is the true school for 
the active, working will. But for the thoughtful, 
wondering affections, a higher discipline is needed; 
an excursion beyond the limits where the senses stop, 
into regions where usage, breathless and exhausted, 
drops behind; where the beaten ways of expectation 
disappear, and we must find the sun-path of faith 
and reason, or else be lost. Only by baffled anticipa- 
tion do we learn to revere what is above our hand ; 
and custom must break in pieces before us, if we are 
to keep right the everlasting love within us, as well 
as the transient life without. Surrendering itself to 
habit alone, the mind takes step by step right on, 
intent on the narrow strip of its own time, and see- 
ing nothing but its linear direction. But brought to 
the untrodden mountain-side, it is arrested by the 
open ground, and challenged by the very silence, and 
compelled to look abroad in space, and see the fresh, 
wide world of God where all roads have vanished, 
except the elemental high -ways of nature, — the 



524 



THE SEVEN SLEEPERS. 



sweep of storm-felled pines, and the waving-line 
where melted waters flow. Now, in shaking off the 
heavy dreams of custom, and waking us up from the 
swoon so fatal to piety, religion receives the greatest 
aid from history ; and though they seem to be engaged 
in opposite offices, they only divide between them 
the very same. Religion strips the costume from the 
life that is; History restores the costume of the life 
that was ; and by this double action we learn to feel 
sensibly, where the mere dress ends and the true life 
begins ; how much thievish time may steal, and cor- 
roding age reduce to dross ; and what treasure there 
is, which no thief approacheth or moth corrupteth. 
Those who are shut up in the present, either by in- 
voluntary ignorance, or by voluntary devotion to its 
immediate interests, contract a certain slowness of 
imagination, most fatal both to wisdom and to faith. 
Restrained in every direction by agglutination to the 
type of personal experience, their thought cannot 
pass beyond vulgar and material rules ; cannot be- 
lieve in any aspect of existence much different from 
things as they are ; in any beings far removed from 
those that walk the streets to-day; in any events that 
would look absurd in the newspaper, or affect saga- 
cious politicians with serious surprise. Their feeling 
can make nothing of the distinction between the 
mortal and the immortal, the spirit and the form 
of things. If they moralize on human affairs, it 
is only to say one of the two things which, since 
the days of Ecclesiastes, have always fallen from 
Epicurism in its sentimental mood; that all things 
continue as they were, and there can be nothing new 
under the sun ; or that nothing can continue as it is, 
and all that is sublunary passes as the shadow; and 



THE SEVEN SLEEPERS. 



525 



as this dieth, so dieth that. A mind, rich in the past, 
is protected against these mean falsehoods; can dis- 
criminate the mutable social forms, from that per- 
manent humanity, of whose affections, whose strug- 
gles, whose aspirations, whose Providential course, 
history is the impressive record; and thus trained, 
finds it easy to cast an eye of faith upon the living 
word, and discern the soul of individuals and of com- 
munities beneath the visible disguise, so deceitful to 
the shallow, so suggestive to the wise. The habit of 
realizing the past is essential to that of idealizing 
the present. 

But, besides this general affinity between historical 
thought and religious temper, a more direct influence 
of knowledge upon faith is not difficult to trace. 
The great object of our belief and trust cannot be 
conceived of, except in the poorest and faintest way, 
where all is blank beyond mere personal experience. 
A man to whom the present is the only illuminated 
spot, closely pressed in upon by outlying darkness all 
around, will vainly strive to meditate, for example, 
on the eternity of God. What sort of helpless at- 
tempt even can he make towards such a thing ? He 
knows the measure of an hour, a day, a year ; and 
these he may try to multiply without end, to stretch 
along the line of the infinite life. But this numerical 
operation carries no impression ; it has no more re- 
ligion in it, than any other long sum. The mere 
vacant arithmetic of duration travels ineffectually on ; 
glides through without contact with the Living God ; 
and gives only the chill of a void loneliness. Time, 
like Space, cannot be appreciated by merely looking 
into it. As in the desert, stretching its dreary dust to 
the horizon, all dimensions are lost in the shadowless 



526 



THE SEVEN SLEEPERS. 



sunshine; so, over a mere waste of years, the fancy 
strains itself only to turn dizzy. As, in the one, we 
want objects to mark the retreating distance, the 
rising spire, the sheltered green, the swelling light on 
headland slope; so, in the other, we need visible 
events standing off from view to make us aware of 
the great perspective. And for the ends of faith, 
they must be moral vicissitudes, the deeply-colored 
incidents of human life ; or, thevastness which we see 
we shall not love; we shall traverse the infinite, and 
never worship. Science, as well as history, has its 
Past to show; — a Past, indeed, much larger; run- 
ning, with huge strides, deep into the old Eternity. 
But its immensity is dynamical, not divine; gigan- 
tesque, not holy; opening to us the monotonous 
perseverance of physical forces, not the various 
struggles and sorrows of free will. And though 
sometimes, on passing from the turmoil of the city, 
and the heats of restless life, into the open temple of 
the silent universe, we are tempted to think, that there 
is the taint of earth, and here the purity of heaven ; 
yet sure it is, that God is seen by us through man, 
rather than through nature ; and that without the eye 
of our brother, and the voices of our kind, the winds 
might sigh, and the stars look down on us in vain. 
Nor is the Christian conception of the second and 
higher existence of man heartily possible to those 
who are shut out from all historic retrospect. At 
least, the idea of other nations and other times, the 
mental picture of memorable groups that have passed 
away ; the lingering voices of poets, heroes, saints, 
floating on the ear of thought; are a great, if not an 
indispensable aid to all hope of the future, which can 
scarcely maintain itself without attendant images. 



THE SEVEN SLEEPERS. 



527 



That old, distant, venerable earth of ours, with its 
quaint people, lies silent in the remote places of our 
thought; and is not far from the scene of scarcely 
more mysterious life, where all now abide with God ; 
the same perspective embraces them both; it is but 
the glance of an eye from below to above ; and as the 
past reality of the one does not prevent its being 
now ideal, so the present ideality of the other is no 
hindrance to its reality. The two states, — that in 
the picture of history, and that on the map of faith, 
— recede almost equally from our immediate experi- 
ence ; and the conception of the one is a sensible help 
to the realization of the other. Indeed there is not a 
truth of religion in reference to the future and the 
unseen, which the knowledge of the past does not 
bring nearer to our minds. And when we invoke this 
aid to faith, we give it an ally, not, as might seem, 
accessible to learning only, but singularly open to the 
resources of ordinary men. Happily, the very foun- 
tains and depositaries of our religion are historical ; 
and records of human affairs, not theories of physical 
nature, are supplied in the sacred writings, from 
which we learn the lessons of Providence. Apart 
from all questions of inspiration, there is no grander 
agent than the Bible in this world. It has opened 
the devout and fervid East to the wonder and affec- 
tion of the severer West. It has made old Egypt 
and Assyria more familiar to Christendom than its 
own lands; and to our people at large the Pharaohs 
are less strange than the Plantagenets, and Abraham 
is more distinct than Alfred. The Hebrew prophet 
finds himself in the presence of the English trades- 
man, or domesticated in the Scotch village; and is 
better understood when he speaks of Jordan, than 



528 



THE SEVEN SLEEPERS. 



the poet at home who celebrates the Greta or the 
Yarrow. Scenes of beauty, pictures of life, rise on the 
people's thought across the interval of centuries and 
continents. Pity and terror, sympathy and indigna- 
tion, fly over vast reaches of time, and alight on 
many a spot else unclaimed by our humanity, and 
unconsecrated by the presence of our God. It is a 
discipline of priceless value ; securing for the general 
mind materials of thought and faith most rich and 
varied; and breaking that servile sleep of custom, 
which is the worst foe of true belief and noble hope. 
From the extension of such discipline, according to 
opportunity, whosoever is vigilant to keep a living 
faith, will draw ever fresh stores ; and, that he may 
better dwell in heart with Him 'who declareth the 
end from the beginning,' will ' remember the former 
things of old.' 



XLII. 



THE SPHERE OF SILENCE. 
I. MAN'S. 

Luke vi. 45. 

of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaketh. 

It is often assumed as if implied in these words, that 
whatever is a fit subject for thought is necessarily the 
fit subject of conversation. As language is but the 
expression of the mind, it seems natural to suppose 
that the mind must appear through its medium ; that 
the matters which occupy the lips must be those 
which engage the heart ; and that no deep and pow- 
erful interest can fail to overflow, in its full propor- 
tion, on our communications with each other. That 
about which silence is the habit, and speech the 
exception, — which, even in the sweet counsel of 
friends, glides in but for the moment and flits away, 
— cannot, it is affirmed, have any strong and con- 
stant hold upon men ; and by its transiency, con- 
fesses itself to be an evanescent interest. Many 
there are who apply this rule to Religion ; and who 
would measure the reality and force of its influence 
on the character by the frequency and explicitness of 
its appearance in our discourse. If we are truly 
penetrated with the same highest concerns ; if we are 
standing in the same attitude before God ; if the 
same solemnity of life covers us with its cloud, and 
45 



530 



THE SPHERE OF SILENCE. 



the same glory of hope guides us by its fire ; — how- 
can we do otherwise than always speak together of a 
lot so awful and a faith so high ? May it not be 
fairly doubted, whether those, who are drawn by no 
experience, inspired by no joy, melted by no sorrow, 
to break their reserve on these things, have any de- 
vout belief of them at all. 

There seems to be a show of reason in this ; and 
when it is urged on the modest and self-distrustful, 
they often gather from it a lesson of inw^ard reproach, 
and know not how to answer. Yet the appeal has 
always failed to gain its end. It has not unsealed the 
lips of men to converse of divine, as they would of 
human, things ; a certain loneliness, which cannot be 
removed, still hangs over their loftiest relations ; and 
they are stricken, as with dumbness, to one another, 
before God. There is, indeed, a foundation in our 
unperverted nature for this repugnance to mingle 
talk and worship, to look into another's eye and say 
the thought of inward prayer ; and it is a harsh and 
false interpretation to take such repugnance as the 
sign of irreligion. Many an earnest and devout 
heart, too lowly to teach others, too quiet to pro- 
claim itself, you may find watching the scene of 
human things through a constant atmosphere of 
piety ; recognizing a holy light on all ; touching each 
duty with a gentle and willing love ; yet saying not 
a word, because unable to make a special tale of that 
which is but the truth of nature. And many a family 
group may be observed, gathering round the decline 
of some venerated life, well knowing whither it fast 
tends ; and he who discerns nothing beneath the sur- 
face, may think it but a worldly thing, that all the 
care seems to be spent in providing outward allevia- 



THE SPHERE OF SILENCE. 



531 



tion, and sheltering from inward shock, and keeping 
some glow of tempered cheerfulness about the slack- 
ening pulse and deepening chill of life. But an eye 
less obtuse may often read a secret meaning in all 
this, and recognize in it the symbol of an unspoken 
mystery ; the sacred hope, the perfect trust, the will 
laid low, the love raised high, make their confession 
by faithful act, and learn the right of a holy silence. 
And, assuredly, he to whose ready speech the sancti- 
ties most quickly come, who has no difficulty in 
running over everlasting things, and never pauses at 
the awful name, and can coin the words for what is 
most dear and deep, is not often the most truly 
devout. The sects and classes, moreover, who make 
the greatest point of bringing their Christianity into 
the drawing-room, the street or the senate, after be- 
guiling you into respect and perhaps admiration, 
continually let out the other half of the truth by 
some surprising coarseness or some selfish intolerance. 
Yet, in spite of these appearances, it is altogether 
true that ' of the abundance of the heart, the mouth 
speaketh.' 

Language has two functions, easily distinguished, 
yet easily forgotten. It is an instrument of com- 
munication with one another ; and an instrument of 
thought within ourselves. Plato used to say that 
Thought and Speech are the same ; only that thought 
is the mind's silent dialogue with itself.* It need 

* The definition is so apposite, that I am tempted to subjoin it : — 
£E. Ovxovv Siavoia f.tev xal Xoyog ravrov ' nV> t v u [lev tvrog rfjg 

ipvxtjg Tt^bg avx\ t v diuXoyog avev (pu>v>~g yiyvv^uvog rovr' avro fjfriv 

inwvouuO&t], diuvoia ; 
QEjLl. Tlavv \ilv ovv. 

Sophista, 263, E. The same thought is more fully presented in the 
Thesetetus, 180, E. 190, A. 



532 



THE SPHERE OF SILENCE. 



not, however, be always silent ; in its higher moods 
it presses for utterance ; it cannot go on to rise with- 
out casting away the burthen of its words ; and out- 
bursts of song and pulses of prayer are as successive 
strokes of the ever-beating wing of aspiration. But 
in this we want no one to hear us ; we could bear no 
watchful human presence ; the voice is but the relief 
to the spirit overcharged ; and our nature could not 
thus revolve in its own circuit, except in the loneliness 
which shelters it from foreign attractions. Speech 
therefore assumes two forms ; Converse and Solilo- 
quy ; the one intended to convey our thought abroad ; 
the other to detain it at home ; the one, opening 
what we wish ; the other what we hide ; the one, the 
common talk of life ; the other equivalent to silence, 
except to those who may overhear. Of the latter 
only did Jesus say, that ' out of the abundance of the 
heart, the mouth speaketh.' He knew that what men 
utter face to face is often far different from the 
real thought of their minds ; that they are no less 
ashamed of their best feelings than of their worst ; 
and that, by watching the coin of words that passes 
between them in the open commerce of life, you can 
ill judge of the secret wealth or insolvency of their 
souls. To estimate them aright, you must wait till 
the company disperse ; and linger near them when 
they speak, amid the silence of God, not to others, 
but from themselves. Nor does this divergence of 
their private thought from their public conversation 
imply the slightest approach to artfulness and duplic- 
ity ; on the contrary, it is possibly the most artless 
of whom it is most true. The false man has lost the 
half of himself which makes this variance. The 
double dealer has but a single nature; but in the 



THE SPHERE OE SILENCE. 



533 



pure and guileless, there are two souls ; of which the 
one comes forward amid human things with quick 
and genial speech, while the other ever sits with 
finger on the lips. The one achieves its end, with 
energy and stir like that of the city's industry; the 
other noiselessly, like the spring growth of forest and 
of field ; the one opens gladly out, the other shrinks, 
as if scorched, within, at the light of the human eye. 
Our nature is as a flower that shines of itself with 
one color by night, and reflects from the sun another 
by day ; and those who see only its borrowed gayety 
at noon, know nothing of its own fainter beauty be- 
neath the stars. The truth is, the presence of our 
fellows, and the exchange of looks and words with 
them, are the great instruments of self-consciousness, 
and are suitable for all those parts and faculties of a 
man which are improved by study and attention. 
But there are elements of our being that were never 
meant for this ; which change their character by 
being breathed upon ; or which vanish in the sound 
that utters them. They will insist on flowing 
unobstructed in their natural bed ; and if gossip will 
arrest and dam them up, they are turned from the 
torrent of health- into the marsh of pestilence. 

There are things too low to be spoken of ; which 
indeed become low by being spoken of. The appe- 
tites are of this kind. They were meant to be the 
beginnings of action, not the end of speech; and 
under the dropping of words, they are as wholesome 
food analyzed into constituent poisons. God lights 
that fire, and does not want our breath to blow it, or 
the fuel of our thought to feed it. The inferior im- 
pulses in man are glorified by being placed at the 
natural disposal of higher sentiments; they are sub- 
45* 



534 



THE SPHERE OF SILENCE. 



mitted to the transforming power of generous aspira- 
tion and great ideas. Wielded by these, they are far 
above the level of Sense ; and are not only controlled 
by conscience, but dignified by the light of beauty, 
and ennobled by the alliance of affection. Their just 
action is secured far less by repressive discipline 
against them, than by nourishing the strength of the 
humanities that use them ; by keeping them wholly 
inattentive to themselves; by breaking every mirror 
in which their own face may be beheld. Purity 
consists, not in the ascetic abnegation of the lower, 
but in a Christian emerging of the lower in the 
higher; in the presence of a divine perception so 
quick to recoil from degradation, that avoidance 
aforethought need not be studiously provided, And 
purity of mind is forfeited, less by exceeding rules of 
moderation, than by needing them ; — by attention 
to the inferior pleasures, as such. There might be 
less of moral evil in the rude banquet of heroic times, 
marked perhaps by excess, but warmed by social 
enthusiasm, and idealized by lofty minstrelsy, than in 
many a meal of the prudent dietician, setting a police 
over his sensations, and weighing out the scruples of 
enjoyment for his palate. Not rules* of quantity, but 
habits of forgetfulness, constitute our emancipation 
from the animal nature. You cannot make any 
good thing of the voluptuary's mind, regulate it as 
you may. It may be covered over with an external 
disguise; it may be strengthened by self-restraint for 
social use ; but, with all its wise ways, what trace 
can God behold there of his own image ? He sees at 
best Aristotle's 'rational animal,' not one of Christ's 
< children of the Highest.' Most futile is the attempt 
so prevalent in our days, to base the morality of the 



THE SPHERE OF SILENCE. 



535 



appetites on physiology; to open the way to heaven 
with the dissecting knife ; to give up the Prophets for 
the 'Constitution of Man;' and with a gospel of di- 
gestion to replace the Sermon on the Mount. Let 
us indeed accept such help as may come from this 
source also ; but let us rate it at its worth, and assign 
to it its place. Good for the remedy of bodily disease, 
it is not good for the formation of character ; and it 
is odious as the substitute for religion. Whoever 
found himself nearer God by inspecting drawings of 
internal inflammation? There may be those, to 
whom the check of abjectness and fear may be of 
service, and who must walk an hospital before they 
can respect a law. But as an element of education 
this kind of teaching is fatally misplaced. The ideas 
it communicates cannot co-exist with the high, de- 
vout affections, which are the natural guides and 
safeguards of a pure heart; they can occur only in 
uneasy succession with them, and are repelled by 
them with unconquerable antipathy. Indeed, in good 
minds, not needing recovery from fall, all mere physi- 
cal and prohibitive morality is liable to be a source 
of direct contamination. By simply talking about 
your rules, you may turn innocence into guilt. The 
mere discussion of a habit necessarily converts it into 
a self-conscious indulgence or privation ; and thereby 
totally alters its real character and its moral relations; 
and may make that evil which was not evil before. 
And thus, the very cure of outward excess may some- 
times be attended with the creation of inward corrup- 
tion ; and what was harmless till you mentioned it, 
becomes sinful by being named. So are words great 
powers in this world ; not only telling what things 
are, but making them what else they would not be; 



536 



THE SPHERE OF SILENCE. 



and they cannot encroach upon the sphere of silence, 
without desecrating the sanctuary of nature, and 
banishing the presence of God. 

There are also things too high to be spoken of; 
and which cease to be high, by being made objects 
of ordinary speech. Language occupies the mid- 
region of our life, between the wants that ground us 
on the earth, and the affections that lift us to the 
skies. If we were all animal, we could not use it; if 
we were as God, we should give it up, and lapse, 
like him, into eternal silence. It is the instrument of 
business, of learning, of mutual understanding, of 
common action; the tool of the Intellect and the 
Will ; the glory of a nature more than brutal, the 
mark of one less than the divine ; as truly the char- 
acteristic of labor in the mind, as the sweat of the 
brow of the body's toil ; emblem at once of blessing 
and of curse; recalling an Eden half remembered, 
while we work in the desert that can never be forgot. 
When we try to raise it to higher functions, it only 
spoils the thing it cannot speak ; which becomes, like 
an uttered secret, a treasure killed and gone. Re- 
ligion in the soul is like a spirit hiding in enshadowed 
forests; call it into the staring light, it is exhaled 
and seen no more; or as the whispering of God 
among the trees; peer about behind the leaves, and 
it is not there. Men in deep reverence do not talk to 
one another, but remain with hushed mind side by 
side. Each one feels, though he cannot tell how it 
is, that words limit what faith declares unlimited; 
that they divide and break to pieces, what it compre- 
hends and embraces as a whole ; that they distribute 
into dead members what it discerns as a life of 
beauty indivisible; that they reduce to successive 



THE SPHERE OF SILENCE. 



537 



propositions what it adores as a simultaneous and 
everlasting reality. The whole operation of the mind 
in communicating by speech is the direct opposite of 
that which bends in worship ; the one laboring after 
definite conceptions and scientific reasoning; the 
other intuitively evading both, and bursting the fet- 
ters which the provinces of nature own, but the infini- 
ty of God rejects. Hence it is that men lower the 
voice as they distantly approach these things, and 
deem it fit to let their words be few. Spoken rever- 
ence passes into cant; or, in more elaborated forms, 
into philosophy. I do not say that there may not be 
an intermediate period, when earnest men are able 
to establish a mutual language of religion which, 
in their day, is true to them ; but from the moment 
of its first freshness it begins to fade ; and the hour 
of its birth is the beginning of its death. And soon 
the devoutest spirits will be those that say the least; 
and the currency, once priceless, now debased, will 
remain chiefly with Pharisees and professional di- 
vines. True, there is a sceptic, as well as a devout 
silence on the highest things. But who is there that 
cannot tell at a glance the difference between the 
shrinking of unbelief, and the shrinking of reverence ? 
Look only at their eye ; and the shallow gloss of the 
one is not like the deep light of the other. The one 
pushes the matter externally away ; the other hides it 
internally from view. The one is averse to take the 
divine ideas into the mind; the other recoils from 
putting them out. The one yields to the repulsion 
of dislike; the other exercises the shelter of an in- 
effable love. There was truth, and not absurdity, in 
the Friends' silent meeting before God ; — a truth 
indeed too great and high for a permanent institution 



538 



THE SPHERE OP SILENCE. 



addressed to our poor nature, but affording an in- 
fallible memorial of the genuine inspiration that once 
breathed through that noble people. And what even 
were the whining voice and tremulous speech, but 
the instinctive attempt to escape from the vulgari- 
ties of life, and reach the strange music, broken, dis- 
sonant, and sweet, in which divine and human things 
conflict and reconcile themselves ? Nor is it essen- 
tially different in any worship ; for, though we meet 
together, it is not to speak with one another; it is not 
even to be spoken to and taught; for that could pro- 
duce nothing but theology ; if it is not for absolute 
silence of devotion (which were best, if it were 
possible), it is only for soliloquy; which is but the 
thought before God, of one, for the guidance of a 
silence before God, of all. It is to Him we lay 
ourselves open, and not to our neighbor; only, 
the sense of brethren near who have concerns like 
our own that bring them hither, who feel with 
us his mystic touch, and look up to his heavenly 
hope, and remember the healing sorrows of his 
mercy, and expect his early call, and trust his ever- 
lasting shelter, — is a mighty help to those deep 
realities which are too great except for the consen- 
taneous grasp of our collective soul. Prayer, like 
poetry, can never be anything but thought aloud; if 
ever it is ' said for the sake of them that stand by,' it 
is a mockery and a pretence, from which every soul 
that is akin to Christ will shrink with abhorrence 
and with awe ; and which none who had been alto- 
gether steeped in his spirit could ever ascribe to 
him. Nor let any one say that this makes the office 
of religion one of uncertain imagination, transient as 
the colors of beauty, and vague as the impressions of 



THE SPHEEE OE SILENCE. 



539 



a dream. Never do we more completely deceive 
ourselves, than when we fancy that the work of the 
understanding is durable, while that of our richer 
genius is evanescent; that what we know is solid, 
what we aspire after and adore in thought is unsub- 
stantial; that the achievements of physical discovery 
are the fixed products of time, while the visions of 
poetry are but the adornments of a passing age. 
How plainly does historical experience contradict 
this estimate ! Of no nation, of no period, within 
the limits of known and transmitted civilization, does 
the most advanced science remain true for us ; while 
of none has the genuine poetry perished. Thales 
and Archimedes have been obsolete for centuries; 
while old Homer is fresh as ever, and delights the 
modern school-boy only less than he did the Greek 
hero. The acuteness of the Athenian intellect has 
left us no account of any law of nature, which the 
greatest masters of ancient knowledge deciphered as 
we do now; but the strains of Job and the rapt song 
of Isaiah will never be worn out, while a human soul 
is on the earth, and the divine heaven above it. The 
readings of philosophy, the creeds of theology, are 
alike transitory ; but the discernment of sacred truth 
and beauty is perpetual and without essential change. 
Never knowing but in part, we find all our knowledge 
successively vanishing away; but in adoring the 
grandeur, feeling the solemnity, and aspiring to the 
perfection of the whole, the inspirations of genius 
and yearnings of faith are consentaneous and eternal. 



XLIIL 



THE SPHERE OF SILENCE. 
II. GOD'S. 
John i. 1 & 14. 

in the beginning was the word ; and the word was with god ; 
and the word was god. and the word was made flesh, and 
dwelt among us (and we beheld his glory, — the glory as of 
the father's only-born) full of grace and truth. 

Human speech, it has already been observed, is 
employed in two different ways, issuing from states 
of mind distinct and almost opposite. We speak to 
impart information ; and we speak in confession of 
ourselves ; in intentional address to the minds of 
others, or in unconscious revelation of our own ; 
drawn by an external end which we wish to compass, 
or propelled by internal feeling which we cannot but 
express. In the one case, we begin with our purpose, 
and then lay, with such skill as we can command, 
our train of approach towards its realization ; in the 
other, we start from the emotion that occupies us, 
and advance a long line of tendency, never lawless 
yet ever unforeseen. The one discloses the policy 
at which our action aims ; the other, the affection 
whence it issues. In the one, we teach, we expound, 
we report the past, we predict the future ; in the 
other, we remember, we hope, we paint the soul's im- 
mediate vision, and own its everlasting faith. In the 



THE SPHERE OF SILENCE. 



541 



one, we talk and reason ; in the other, we meditate 
and sing. History and science are the birth of the 
one ; art and religion, of the other ; morals and 
philosophy, of both. 

But man is not the only being that has this two- 
fold voice. God also puts to a double engagement 
his silent instruments of expression. He too lives 
amid a company of minds ; and to them he has to 
say something of what already he has done, and of 
what he yet designs to do, — to communicate the 
order of the scene on which they stand, and put into 
the hand of expectation a clue of faithful guidance. 
But he also is a Mind, reserving within himself infi- 
nite powers, ever awake and moving ; thought, large 
as space, and deep and solemn as the sea ; holiness, 
stern as the mountains, and pure as the breath that 
sighs around them ; a mercy quick as the light, and 
gentle as the tints that make it. It is not for these 
to remain inert and repressed, as though they were 
not. They must have way, and have their overflow ; 
and if only we place our spirits right, we may catch 
the blessed flood, and find it as the waters of regen- 
eration. Beyond and behind every definite end of 
which it is needful to apprise us, there actually 
exists in the divine nature and indefinite affluence of 
living perfection, which cannot go for nothing in the 
universe. It may have not a word to say to others : 
but whispers will escape it on its own account; it 
may not be heard ; and yet articulately overheard ; 
and, could we only find the focus of those stray 
tones, we should understand more than any knowl- 
edge can tell ; we should learn the very prayers that 
Heaven makes for only Heaven to hear ; and should 
catch the soliloquy of God. And not only can we 
46 



542 



THE SPHERE OE SILENCE. 



find it, but we are ever in it ; and beneath the dome 
of this universe, which is all centre and no circum- 
ference, we cannot stand, where the musings of the 
eternal mind do not murmur round us, and the 
visions of his lonely, loving thought, appear. 

Works of science and history are the medium in 
which men speak to us ; works of poetry and art, 
that in which they speak from themselves. "With 
these the heavenly dialects precisely correspond; 
being in fact the great originals, whereof these are 
but faint echoes. Outward objects of science and his- 
tory, — the phenomena recorded by the one, and the 
events narrated by the other, — all the calculable 
happenings of the frame and order of things, are 
God's didactic address, in which he gives us the infor- 
mation we most need about his ways. And that 
which awakens poetry and art, the invisible light that 
bathes the world, — the nameless essence that fills it, 
— the devout uplifted look of all things, — is the per- 
sonal effusion of God's spirit, by which the secret 
spreads of what he is. In the System of nature and 
life he teaches us his will ; in the Beauty of nature 
and life, he meditates from himself. If we and all 
similar beings were away, the former would become 
unmeaning ; and the busy movements, the mighty 
forces, the mechanical successions, the breathless 
haste of moments, the patient roll of ages, would 
seem to be superseded, and to be a mere senseless 
stir, were they not in sympathy with teeming life, and 
a discipline of countless minds. But in our presence 
or our absence, the everlasting beauty would still 
remain ; all that lay beneath the eternal eye would 
sleep in the serene light, and wait no leave from us. 
That is a thought which God has writ only for him- 



THE SPHERE OF SILENCE. 



543 



self ; a Word of his that asks no audience. Yet he 
cares not to hide it from us ; and he has made us so 
like himself, that a glance suffices to interpret, and to 
fill us with his blessed inspiration. 

God is related to his works and ways, just as 
genius to the creations of poetry or art that issue 
from it; and both must be apprehended in the same 
manner, — by the softened gaze of reverence, not by 
the dry sharp-sightedness of knowledge. All our 
acute study of such things is but a delusion and 
a flattery, if we suppose it really to open to us the 
sources from which they come. You may analyze, 
if you will, the dramas of Shakspeare, the paintings 
of RafFaelle, the music of Beethoven ; you may 
disengage for separate inspection, action, character, 
sentiment, and costume ; grouping and colors ; theme 
and treatment; and you may thus know each com- 
position at every turn ; discern its structure ; recog- 
nize its proportions ; lay your finger on its happiest 
lights. But do you reproduce the state of mind that 
first created it ? Do you get upon the traces of the 
author's way of work ? Are your rules and laws, 
when you have drawn them out, a faithful represen- 
tation of the soul from whose expression you have 
deduced them ? Can they spread beneath any other 
view, the many-clustered plan of life, as it lay beneath 
the player's large and genial eye ; or fill the world 
again with the rich tints and noble forms that re- 
flected their repose upon the painter's face ; or send 
through any second heart the wild night-winds that 
sighed and sung through the deaf musician's soul ? 
This, you will own, your criticism cannot do. At 
best, it does but sketch an artificial method, which if 
it could be perfectly obeyed, might be a substitute for 



544 



THE SPHERE OF SILEXCE. 



the natural one. Only, it cannot be obeyed ; and 
when the attempt is made it produces, not a living 
likeness but a dead imitation ; human nature has 
turned into wax, and the heavens flattened to the 
canvas, and the passion of melody reduced to an un- 
easiness among the strings. The canons of taste, so 
far from being an approach to the mind of the artist, 
are the extreme point of departure from it ; being the 
expression of a dissecting self-consciousness, the in- 
trusion of which would have been fatal to his work. 

Now this principle appears to me to be rigorously 
applicable to our contemplation of the works and 
ways of God. What we call Science is nothing but 
our critical interpretation of nature ; our reduction of 
it into intelligible pieces or constituents, that we may 
view successively what we cannot grasp at once. 
And it no more exhibits to us the real sources from 
which creation sprang, or the modes of its appearing, 
than the critic's system shows us the poet's soul. 
The supposition is as derogatory to God in the one 
case, as it is insulting to genius in the other. The 
books which repeat to us the laws of the physical 
world usually mislead us on this matter. They enu- 
merate certain forces, with which they pretend to be 
on the most intimate footing, and which are able to 
do great things in the universe ; and by putting them 
together in this way and that, they show what events 
would come about; they then point out, that such 
events did actually occur ; and think it proved that 
the real phenomena are manufactured after their 
pattern, and truly spring from the causes in their 
list. Thus Newton is said to have detected the 
powers that determine the planetary orbits. He 
found them, we are assured, to be but two ; one, the 



THE SPHERE OF SILENCE. 



545 



primary impulse that commenced the motion of 
each globe, and sent it careering on its way ; the 
other ; the constant attraction that curves it ever to 
the Sun. So fixed is this representation in our 
thoughts by the exposition of Astronomers, that it 
is generally accepted as a true picture of the fact; 
and, in order to trace the ellipse of our Earth or Mars, 
the two forces are supposed to have been, once upon 
a time, actually put together, and, like the separate 
parts of a machine, brought to co-operate. Yet, 
fondly as this image clings to our fancy, no thought- 
ful man can seriously hold to so gross an error. 
Was there then really a certain moment in the past, 
when the divine hand shot forth the globes, and then 
condensed into the Sun the power to bend them into 
their ever-circling course? Is it an historic fact in the 
universe, that this artillery of the skies was once 
played off, and might be seen by any spirit- witness 
passing by ? No ; the planets are not a mere set of 
bowls ; nor was the great court of the Zodiac bound- 
ed and made plane for such a game as that ! No 
one can well believe that this is an account of what 
actually occurred ; travel through the Past with the 
most vigilant eye, you nowhere arrive at such event. 
The imagination of it is pure fiction, which begins 
and ends with the mind that thinks it. What then, 
you will say, has Newton done ? He has done this ; 
he has found or defined two forces which, if they were 
to operate under the conditions prescribed, would pro- 
duce just such phenomena as we observe. He has 
discovered a way in which the same thing might be 
done ; has detected, not the actual causes, but a 
system of equivalents that will serve the end as well. 
By laying these before us, he fulfils the aim of knowl- 
46* 



546 



THE SPHERE OF SILENCE. 



edge ; he gives us a rule by which to compute the 
course of nature, and from the present to foretell 
the approaching attitudes of things. He draws a true 
picture for us of all the future, and of all the past, 
that lies within the existing order ; but of the source 
of that order, or the posture of affairs before it rose, 
he cannot afford the faintest glimpse. And so is it 
throughout the Sciences. Whenever they give you a 
report of the Causes, they tell you, not the real 
process, but its equivalent ; that by which we should 
work, not that by which God does work. The op- 
tician enumerates the several colors of which light is 
made ; but who can think that thus we learn the 
order of God's creation, — and that first he provided 
the yellow, red, and blue, and then put them together 
to form the one white ray ? The chemist will give you 
a list of what he finds in the bursting seed, the shoot- 
ing plant, the growing animal ; but do you suppose 
that the Divine hand really measures these doses of 
hydrogen and carbon ; that in bringing out the gentle 
grass, and shedding its glory on the forest tree, and 
tracing the dear human face, and putting a strange 
depth into the eye, God works by the pharmacopoeia 
or the scale of chemical equivalents ? Ah no ! else 
were he not the Creator, but the manufacturer, of this 
universe ; a mixer of ingredients ; a worker in wood 
and iron ; little more than a Vulcan, Neptune, or 
iEsculapius, with another name. To be chief artifi- 
cer, chief dyer, chief engineer ; to be able to construct 
a world, to tincture the drapery of the clouds, and 
poise the clustered stars; — this is not to be the 
everlasting God. The steps by which we slowly 
understand are not the order in which he instantly 
discerns and eternally executes. The laws which we 



THE SPHERE OF SILENCE. 547 

extract are but the patient alphabet in which he spells 
out successively to us the tendencies of his sponta- 
neous thought. They are the rules which our criti- 
cism draws from the analysis of his productions ; but, 
like the precepts taken from the study of ancient art, 
they express our afterthought, not his forethought; 
and though they are a true light to our knowledge, 
they are a false shadow on our Religion. In one 
sense, no doubt, they are the voice of God. As men 
talk to us and tell us what they have been doing and 
what they still intend to do ; yet shelter from us, 
perhaps almost from themselves, their inmost love 
and worship; so here does God adopt our speech, 
address himself to our instruction, and teach us the 
outward purpose of his Will ; but opens not the 
infinite Well-spring whence all the power and order 
flow. 

Is this then the only voice of his that comes to us 
from the physical world ? It is the only voice in 
which he directly accosts us, and commands our 
obedience. But we are always in his presence ; and 
there would seem to be when he forgets that we are 
by ; and his own nature confesses itself through all 
the loneliness of Space ; and we may apprehend its 
essence rather than its act. To do this, we have but 
to look on creation as a picture, instead of examin- 
ing it as a machine. It must fix our eye as a w T ork 
of beauty, not as a structure of ingenuity. The sim- 
plest impressions from nature are the deepest and 
most devout ; and to get back to these, after spoiling 
the vision with the artificial glasses of Science, is the 
difficult wisdom of the pure heart. The modest 
flower, nestling in the meadow grass ; the happy tree, 
as it laughs and riots in the wind ; the moody cloud, 



548 



THE SPHERE OE SILENCE. 



knitting its brow in solemn thought ; the river, that 
has been flowing all night long; the sound of the 
thirsty earth, as it drinks and relishes the rain ; these 
things are as a fall hymn, when they flow from the 
melody of nature, but an empty rhythm, when scanned 
by the finger of art. The soul, as it sings, cannot 
both worship and beat time. The rainbow, inter- 
preted by the prism, is not more sacred, than when it 
was taken for the memorandum of God's promissory 
mercy, painting the access and recess of his thought. 
The holy Night, that shows us how much more the 
sunshine hides than it reveals, and warns us that the 
more clearly we see what is beneath our feet, the 
more astonishing is our blindness to what is above 
our heads, is less divine, when watched from the 
observatory of science, than when gazed at from the 
oratory of private prayer. To the one it is the 
ancient architecture, to the other the instant medi- 
tation of the Most High. And so is it with all the 
common features of our world. The daily light, fresh 
as a young child every morning, and dignified as the 
mellowness of age at even ; the yearly changes, less 
fair and dear to our infancy than to our maturity, — 
the weariness of nature as she drops her leaves, the 
glee with which she hangs them out again, — the 
silver mists of autumn, the slanting rains of spring, 
the sweeping lines of drifted . snow ; all are as the 
natural language of God, — the turns of his almighty 
thought, — to the spirit that lies open to their wonder ; 
to others they are but a spinning of the earth, an 
evaporation of the waters, an equilibrium in the 
winds 

It is the same in the case of human life, as in that 
of the outward world. There also our knowledge does 



THE SPHERE OF SILENCE. 



549 



not represent God's ways ; our knowledge being a 
critical deduction of rules which his ways indeed have 
furnished but did not follow. There also we should 
think of him, not as constructing mechanically for an 
end, but creating spontaneously from himself. In our 
review of ancient or modern nations, we are anxious 
to account for the peculiarities that mark them, and 
the influence they have had upon mankind ; and we 
search their climate and geography, their inheritance 
of language and tradition, their relative position and 
experience, for the causes of their special genius and 
institutions. And such enumeration is invaluable in 
its fruits of practical and political wisdom. Only let 
us not imagine that God works by the sort of com- 
position of causes, which our poor intellect is obliged 
to fancy to itself. He did not model the Hebrew, or 
fabricate the Greek, after the fashion of our historical 
analysis, saying to himself, * This climate will do, but 
then it must have that organization, and be mixed 
with such and such sort of memories.' It were con- 
temptible to think that he thus moulds and serves up 
the nations, like one that holds a receipt-book in his 
hand. And so too with the individual mind. Phi- 
losophy, justly curious to observe the structure of our 
faculties, and the nature of those wondrous opera- 
tions by which man alone, of all creatures, has 
acquired a history, endeavors to untwine the finished 
web of thought, and lay out the variegated filaments, 
— the warp of constant nature, and the woof of flying 
experience, — from which the texture seems to have 
been composed. And this also is well ; opening to 
us the deepest problems, and yielding many useful 
lessons. Only we must not suppose that God makes 
men after the pattern of Locke's or Mill's human 



550 



THE SPHERE OF SILENCE. 



nature ; providing the raw material of so many sim- 
ple ideas, with measured lots of pleasure and pain, 
to be mixed up into a Plato, or fused down into a 
Channing. Nor ought we to think that he precon- 
ceives a particular task to be accomplished for the 
world, and then proceeds to make and move men, 
like fitting puppets to perform it. The souls of the 
Sons of God are greater than their business ; and 
they are thrown out, not to do a certain work, but to 
be a certain thing ; to bear some sacred lineaments, 
to show some divine tint, of the Parent Mind from 
which they come. The mighty spirits of our race are 
as the lyric thoughts of God that drop and breathe 
from his Almighty solitude; — transient cords flying 
forth from the strings as his solemn hand wanders 
over the possibilities of beauty. One only finished 
expression of his mind, one entire symmetric strain, 
has fallen on our world. In Christ we have the over- 
flowing Word, the deep and beautiful soliloquy, of 
the Most High ; not his message and his argument, 

— for in that there were no Religion, — but the very 
poetry of God, which could not have been told us 
face to face, but only cast in meditation upon the 
silence of history. Not more certainly do we discern 
in the writings of Shakspeare the greatest manifesta- 
tion of human genius, than in the reality of Christ 
the highest expression of the Divine. Not more 
clearly does the worship of the saintly soul, breathing 
through its window opened to the midnight, betray 
the secrets of its affections, — than the mind of Jesus 
of Nazareth reveals the perfect thought and inmost 
love of the All-ruling God. Were he the only-born, 

— the solitary self-revelation, — of the creative Spirit, 
he could not more purely open the mind of Heaven ; 



THE SPHERE OE SILENCE. 551 

being the very Logos, — the apprehensible nature 
of God, — which, long unuttered to the world, and 
abiding in the beginning with him, has now come 
forth, and dwelt among us full of grace and truth. 



THE END 



6 



